A Novel Mobile Health Technology Ecosystem for the Treatment and Prevention of Cardiovascular Disease: The Connect@Heart Project

Connect@Heart is a digital ecosystem which links existing technologies to improve the effectiveness and efficiency of care for CVD patients. It consists of four components: 1) exchange of health data between wearables, general practitioners and cardiologists; 2) software to identify and follow patients (population health care at the right moment); 3) a dashboard for consultation between doctors; 4) smart technologies at patients’ home. The consortium consists of technology partners (Stizon, Health Base), healthcare insurance company (Zorg&Zekerheid), researchers (LUMC, National eHealth Living Lab), and care partners.

Connect@Heart aimed to create the necessary platform for general practitioners and primary care practice assistants to treat and monitor a large number of patients while improving the quality of care and reducing the CVD burden through optimized risk management programs. In previous practice, a significant number of patients with documented CVD unnecessarily received chronic treatment in specialist medical practices. More effective risk management programs in primary care, such as Connect@Heart, were likely to reduce the number of patients followed up in specialist medical practices unnecessarily. This created the opportunity to reallocate efforts, thus reducing the need to expand medical specialist practices.

In the Connect@Heart project, a feasibility study was conducted, implementing the Connect@Heart digital ecosystem in multiple GP practices in the Leiden region. The study included 300 patients in 5 primary care clinics in the Leiden region (Western Netherlands).

The primary outcome was the usability and implementability of Connect@Heart. Secondary outcomes were patient empowerment, time consumption, costs, and the legal framework. We found that the Connect@Heart intervention was both feasible and usable, and have published a set of implementation strategies that could enable further scaling of Connect@Heart in Dutch primary care. This could in turn lead to more efficacious use of healthcare professional time, and hence more future-proof organization of primary care cardiovascular risk management.