Evaluation of the St Vincent’s Hospital Heart Health Website: An Evidence-Based Resource Tool

Background: Cardiac rehabilitation (CR) is an important tool for secondary prevention of cardiac disease. Despite it’s proven effectiveness, CR remains vastly under-utilised especially amongst the most disadvantaged patients. As an adjunct to CR, the St Vincent’s Heart Health Website (SVHHH) was created by the St Vincent’s Hospital CR team. We evaluated the effectiveness of the website in educating patients about their heart condition.
Methods: An online tool www.svhhearthealth.com.au was created, which included simplified medical text, videos as well as animations. We evaluated this resource using a modified Brief Illness Perception Questionnaire and Patient Activation Questionnair

Results: This online CR education tool was viewed over 70,000 times in the first year. It improved patients’ knowledge of their heart condition as well as confidence to return to activities of daily living and make healthier lifestyle choices. The improvements were seen irrespective of age and primary place of residence. While older subjects had the lowest confidence using the internet, they demonstrated the greatest self-reported improvement in knowledge.

Conclusion: The St Vincent’s heart health website showed great promise as an educational tool for patients, demonstrated by patients’ statistically significant improvement in understanding of cardiac disease. We predict this knowledge will lead to increased compliance with health care to reduce overall mortality and morbidity from heart disease. Because of this, it is anticipated that online health resources will become an important adjunct to traditional teaching methods across all medical specialties to improve patient outcomes.