Performance Measures for Short-Term Cardiac Rehabilitation in Patients of Working Age: Results of the Prospective Observational Multicenter Registry OutCaRe.

Objective: To determine immediate performance measures for short-term, multicomponent cardiac rehabilitation (CR) in clinical routine in patients of working age, taking into account cardiovascular risk factors, physical performance, social medicine, and subjective health parameters and to explore the underlying dimensionality.

Design: Prospective observational multicenter register study in 12 rehabilitation centers throughout Germany.

Setting: Comprehensive 3-week CR.

Participants: Patients (N=1586) ≤65 years of age (mean 53.8±7.3y, 77.1% men) in CR (May 2017-May 2018).

Interventions: Not applicable.

Main Outcome Measures: Feasibility, defined by data availability for ≥85% of patients (CR admission and discharge), and modifiability based on pre-post comparison (statistical significance, with value<.01; standardized effect size≥.35; change by ≥5% points in categorical variables). In addition, latent factors were identified using an exploratory factor analysis (EFA).

Results: Based on feasibility and modifiability criteria, smoking behavior, lifestyle change behavior, blood pressure, endurance training load, depression in Patient Health Questionnaire-9 (PHQ-9), the 5-item World Health Organization Well-Being Index (WHO-5), physical and mental health and pain scale of the indicators of rehabilitation status-24 (IRES-24), and self-assessed health prognosis proved to be suitable performance measures. As a result of the EFA, 2 solid factors were identified: (1) including PHQ-9, WHO-5, mental health (IRES-24), mental quality of life, and anxiety and (2) including physical quality of life, physical health and pain scale of IRES-24, and self-assessed occupational prognosis. A third factor represents the blood pressure.

Conclusions: We provide a small set of performance measures, that are essentially based on 3 latent factors (subjective mental health, physical health, blood pressure). These performance measures can represent immediate success of comprehensive CR and be applied easily in clinical practice.