The main aim of Cardiac Rehabilitation is the reduction of new clinical events through cardiovascular risk factors control. In the Florence Cardiologic Unit of the Don Gnocchi Foundation
IntroductionAccording to the World Health Organization (1993) cardiac rehabilitation is "the sum of activities and interventions required to ensure the best possible physical, mental, and social conditions so that patients with chronic or post-acute cardiovascular disease may, by their own efforts, preserve or resume their proper place in society and lead an active life" [1].
Aims of cardiac rehabilitationIn this perspective, cardiac rehabilitation is aimed at: a) short-term prevention of disability that may result from heart disease, by appropriate evidence-based prescription of drugs and physical exercise; b) long-term prevention of subsequent cardiovascular events, by strict control of modifiable cardiovascular risk factors [2][3][4][5][6][7][8][9][10].A testing of the achievement of these goals ("product indicators"), as well as an outline of user characteristics of any single Rehabilitation Centre ("case mix"), are essential for National Health Service planning. Furthermore, the possibility of correlating clinical and instrumental data, treatment protocols and outcomes is mandatory for research in the cardiac rehabilitation field.The above considerations strongly suggest the need for an effective computer tool.
Traditional and computerized DatabasesCurrently available databases for medical use may be classed into two categories: a) computerized medical files; b) traditional databases. Computerized medical files effectively replace paper medical files and have the advantage of allowing quick consultation of previously recorded data and of printing paper documents, when needed. Nevertheless, data are filed as texts and are not suitable for further processing.On the contrary, data recorded in traditional databases are filed as figures and can be easily processed. Furthermore, traditional databases have substantial limits referable to three issues: a) their use implies an overload that is negatively perceived on the part of their users, since the latter have to fill in electronic formats after having already filled in paper documents; b) their informative content is often incomplete and/or unreliable because of the lack of an effective quality control system for inserted data; c) the majority of available data are stocked in text format, precluding future extraction of numerical information for statistical analysis.