Cardiac Rehabilitation Services

Cardiac Rehabilitation

The Challenge

Cardiovascular disease is the leading cause of death and disability in the UK.

Cardiac rehabilitation (CR) is a personalised program of supervised exercise, education, and counselling. It is a clinically proven, NICE recommended intervention which significantly reduces mortality, hospital readmissions, and improves quality of life for patients following a cardiac event.

Yet services are under severe strain: referral rates remain lower than national targets, waiting lists are growing, and delivery teams face mounting administrative burden.

0 M+

People in the UK living
with cardiovascular
disease

~ 0 %

Of eligible patients
never access cardiac
rehabilitation

£ 0 bn+

Annual NHS cost
attributable to
cardiovascular disease

Deliver standardised group rehab programmes

Supervised exercise groups

The backbone of every CR programme. The warm-up and cool-down are genuinely group activities; the circuit element is individualised within the group setting. These are the highest-frequency group touchpoints and the ones where scheduling and DNA reduction have the most direct impact.

Cardiovascular education groups

Standard education session topics include anatomy and disease pathophysiology, anxiety and depression, self-management, managing breathlessness and symptoms, medications and treatments, managing exacerbations, nutrition, pacing, and smoking cessation.

Psychological support and relaxation groups

Psychological support and relaxation are core components of UK cardiac rehabilitation (CR) programmes. Typically delivered via psychoeducational workshops and group-based training, they teach patients diaphragmatic breathing, progressive muscle relaxation, and coping techniques to alleviate post-event anxiety, reduce stress, and improve long-term cardiovascular recovery

Heart failure specialist groups

Heart failure specialist groups in cardiac rehabilitation (CR) integrate specialist nurses, physiotherapists, and dieticians to provide tailored exercise, medication titration, and education

Return to work groups

Assign OTs to run specific sessions around occupational rehabilitation: managing symptoms at work, graded return to activity, and communicating with employers.

Your custom groups

The groups above are just a few examples you can configure in autonom-e. Alternatively, you can create your own groups, appointments and associated resources to assign as many staff and patients as needed!

How group therapy can help

A single clinician delivering an 8-week virtual group therapy programme to 10 patients generates the same throughput as 80 individual appointments — without proportional cost increases or the need to travel.

The challenge is with coordination: scheduling cohorts, capturing PROMs across groups, managing reminders, and reporting outcomes at the service level.

Autonom-e provides the digital infrastructure that makes group therapy possible and scalable whilst reducing administrative burden, improving workforce utilisation and the patient experience.

Each session is scheduled, patients are automatically notified, PROMs are captured before and after each block, and outcomes are available in real time on the clinician dashboard.

Co-ordinating group therapy

Referral & Triage

Cohort assignment

Session scheduling

Automated reminders

Monitoring & review

Discharge & PIFU

Platform Features for group therapy services

Streamlined referral, assessment & triage

Patients can be referred from primary care, from external referring teams across a region, or via self-referral if enabled.

Referrals sent directly to autonom-e are encrypted at rest and in transit.

Entry assessments can be configured for different pathways to support initial triage and stratification into group cohorts.

Pre- and post-programme PROM capture to measure group-level and individual outcomes.

Group scheduling and cohort management

Create blocks of weekly group therapy sessions in advance from the clinical dashboard. Triage patients and assign to appropriate groups based on external referral recommendations.

Assign facilitating staff & tech support to each session. Sessions automatically push to each patient’s app with date, time, format, and joining instructions.

Reporting and service analytics

Automated PROM dispatch on entry and exit of therapy programmes collects outcomes to demonstrate change in health.

Recorded attendance allows staff to monitor uptake, throughput, DNA rates, and ROI for every hour of staff time spent delivering care.

Cohort-level outcomes dashboards showing improvement trends across group programmes. Individual patient progress visible within the group context. Export clinical reports directly to electronic health records.

Service-level data to support commissioning decisions, business cases, and NICE compliance reporting. Cost-effectiveness modelling data to demonstrate value to ICB commissioners.

Self-management and resources

Configurable digital resource library aligned to each group programme (condition-specific written, audio, and video content). Signposting to peer support, local services, and third-party providers within the app.

Translatable resources supporting diverse and multilingual populations. eDiary tools for symptom tracking, goal-setting, and exertion monitoring between sessions

Why choose autonom-e for cardiac rehabilitation?

Configurable to your pathway

Tailor group programme structures, eligibility criteria, PROM bundles, session formats, resources, and branding to match your service design – without expensive bespoke development.

Reduces administrative burden

Appointment scheduling, automated PROM capture eliminate paper, postage, and manual data entry. 1,250+ estimated clinical admin hours saved each year in Lancashire.

Reduces waiting times

Group therapy enables services to multiply appointment availability with the same staff time, allowing for waiting times to be cut and pre-appointment administrative tasks to be automated.

Scalable across organisationstions

Deploy autonom-e in a single-service or multi-site deployments across ICBs, NHS Trusts, community providers, and VCSE organisations – with each site maintaining its own configuration and branding.

Evidence ready

Capture group-level and individual outcomes data to evaluate service impact, demonstrate cost-effectiveness to commissioners, and support research bids or NICE submissions.

Improved health equity

Increased rehab provision and workforce utilisation enables patients to receive more intensive and multi-disciplinary care remotely from home, without the need for travel.