The Impact of Telemedicine in the Rehabilitation of Patients with Heart Diseases

Abstract

The potential that telemedicine interventions may have in effectively delivering remote specialized cardiovascular care to large numbers of patients with heart diseases has recently come under question. In the first phase of this thesis, a systematic review and meta-analysis was conducted to compare the impact of a basic form of telemedicine that is regular patient follow-up by telephone, with usual care for individuals with coronary artery disease following their discharge. In the second phase of this thesis, a network meta-analysis, using Bayesian methods for multiple treatment comparisons, was conducted to compare the more complex forms of telemedicine for patients with heart failure. In the third and final phase of this thesis, a randomized controlled trial was designed to compare the impact of two forms of telemedicine, identified in the earlier two phases as being the most promising, on clinical outcomes, cardiac risk factors and patient reported outcomes.