Numerous Deep Learning (DL) scenarios have been developed for evolving new healthcare systems that leverage large datasets, distributed computing, and the Internet of Things (IoT). However, the data used in these scenarios tend to be noisy, necessitating the incorporation of robust pre-processing techniques, including data cleaning, preparation, normalization, and addressing imbalances. These steps are crucial for generating a robust dataset for training. Designing frameworks capable of handling such data without compromising efficiency is essential to ensuring robustness. This research aims to propose a novel healthcare framework that selects the best features and enhances performance. This robust deep learning framework, called (R-DLH2O), is designed for forecasting cardiovascular crises. Unlike existing methods, R-DLH2O integrates five distinct phases: robust pre-processing, feature selection, feed-forward neural network, prediction, and performance evaluation. This multi-phase approach ensures superior accuracy and efficiency in crisis prediction, offering a significant advancement in healthcare analytics. H2O is utilized in the R-DLH2O framework for processing big data. The main improvement of this paper lies in the unique form of the Whale Optimization Algorithm (WOA), specifically the Modified WOA (MWOA). The Gaussian distribution approach for random walks was employed with the diffusion strategy to choose the optimal MWOA solution during the growth phase. To validate the R-DLH2O framework, six performance tests were conducted. Surprisingly, the MWOA-2 outperformed other heuristic algorithms in speed, despite exhibiting lower accuracy and scalability. The suggested MWOA was further analyzed using benchmark functions from CEC2005, demonstrating its advantages in accuracy and robustness over WOA. These findings highlight that the framework’s processing time is 436 s, mean per-class error is 0.150125, accuracy 95.93%, precision 92.57%, and recall 93.6% across all datasets. These findings highlight the framework’s potential to produce significant and robust results, outperforming previous frameworks concerning time and accuracy.