Despite currently only few people make use of the cardiac rehabilitation phase-III program and the efficacy of the program is not clear the Austrian health insurance institutions need to make a decision whether to go on with it as a reimbursed service for patients.

Therefore we conducted a retrospective cohort study based on patients’ data of the cardiac rehabilitation centers and claim data from health insurance institutions. We choose a two stage concept in developing the evaluation plan based on data from the “Zentrums für ambulante Rehabilitation (ZAR)” first and then application of the plan to data from the rehabilitation centers from the AGAKAR.

We compared patients with and without phase-III rehabilitation in Austria in between 2006 and 2009. We evaluated socio-economic attributes, medical parameters as well as primary outcomes death and re-hospitalisation caused by cardiovascular events in a follow up period up to two years.

We observed some differences between the groups concerning the defined outcomes, although data quality was partially very poor and only few statistical results had enough power.
Furthermore we developed recommendations on data collection and associated procedures.

Results of evaluation of AGAKAR centres can be read in report 31b.