Development of a Patient-Centered Digital Clinical Decision Support System Prototype for Cardiac Rehabilitation

Abstract

Introduction. Cardiovascular diseases remain a leading cause of mortality, disability, and reduced quality of life, supporting the need for more accessible and consistent digital approaches in cardiac rehabilitation.Aim. To develop and functionally verify a patient-centred digital clinical decision support system prototype for cardiac rehabilitation.Materials and methods. The prototype was developed using systems analysis, a review of clinical guidelines, functional modelling, and software design. It was implemented as a modular web-based platform in Python using Streamlit 1.45.1. Functional verification was performed using six predefined classes of synthetic test scenarios: normal, borderline, abnormal, combined, incomplete, and out-of-range inputs.Results. The prototype integrates seven clinical workflow functions across five cooperating software components, including patient data entry, functional testing, analytical processing, ICF integration, clinical reporting, personalised recommendations, and rehabilitation protocol preparation. Functional verification reproduced the expected workflow across all six scenario classes, including input validation, calculation of indicators, rule activation, preliminary ICF-oriented mapping, therapist review, and protocol generation. Invalid and incomplete inputs were handled without silent failure.Conclusions. The developed prototype demonstrates the feasibility of integrating structured functional assessment, transparent rule-based processing, preliminary ICF-oriented interpretation, therapist review, and rehabilitation documentation within a single clinician-supervised digital workflow. Further clinical validation is required before routine clinical use.