Eleanor Wicks, cardiologist and clinical lead at Lifeyear, explains why we need to redesign digital first, remote patient management and heart care around people’s lives.
Cardiovascular disease (CVD) is the UK’s biggest killer, causing over a quarter of all deaths in the UK, according to the British Heart Foundation. That’s not a point of debate, it’s the reality that sits behind so many overwhelmed wards, waiting rooms and exhausted staff. CVD is responsible for more than 170,000 deaths every year in the UK and an even larger share of the NHS workload, with over half of the population expected to suffer a heart or circulatory condition in their lifetime.
The drivers are plain to see. Rising multimorbidity, poor lifestyle factors at population scale, growing prevalence of diabetes, obesity and hypertension, and a steady increase in conditions such as heart failure. We have pushed historic therapies close to their limits; the dial on survival and prevalence is no longer shifting the way it once did. If we want different outcomes, we have to deliver care differently and more effectively.
The 10 Year Health Plan is built on three pillars that we’ll all be aware of: hospital to community, analogue to digital, and treatment to prevention. Cardiovascular care sits at the crossroads of all three, and addressing it is core to improving quality of life for so many patients.
Closing the dangerous gap
Let’s start with the most human problem in our pathway, the gap that many people fall into when moving between settings.
Take a simple example: a patient with heart failure is discharged from hospital. In theory, they’ll be seen by the specialist team or a community service for medication optimisation, monitoring and support. In practice, there’s an at-risk period between discharge and that next point of contact when the patient is effectively on their own.
What is needed is remote monitoring, structured symptom capture and medication support that follow the patient out of the hospital door and into everyday life. Instead of relying on an over-subscribed clinic or a long-delayed telephone call, patients need continuity and a single, coherent care plan that can be acted on by hospital teams, community teams and GPs alike. This isn’t about digital for digital’s sake. It’s about delivering specialist-level oversight where people actually live, so they don’t return to acute care.
From disconnected tasks to a connected pathway
Digital cardiovascular care is about far more than a video appointment. It’s about transforming manual, episodic processes into a connected, data-driven pathway.
Two shifts matter here. First, the need to collect the right information before the clinical encounter. If a doctor knows a patient’s medication, their symptoms and any trends, blood pressure, heart rate and weight, and they can see a basic mental health assessment, then the time they spend with the patient can be spent focusing on decisions, not data gathering. Second, the insights that are currently invisible. For instance, cardiovascular teams rarely have the bandwidth to assess anxiety or depression, yet these factors materially affect adherence and outcomes. By embedding simple assessments and education into the pathway and making them available to clinical teams, we can act earlier and more precisely.
Let’s be honest about equity and usability. Not everyone is tech-literate, and not everyone has the same access, but we’re already seeing that many people are increasingly comfortable with using tech such as smartphones and wearables to monitor fitness and activity levels. The job is to design around real-world use, keep the experience simple, and integrate with existing systems (community and acute), not create yet another silo.
That means working across EMIS, Epic, Cerner Millennium and other companies, and minimising duplication, admin and the daily pressure that burns clinicians out.
Prompts and automation
For decades, cardiovascular care has been reactive by treating the heart attack, discharging, and hoping the follow-up lands. A digital pathway lets us change that rhythm. Today, remote services can nudge with prompts such as “Your last cholesterol reading was high, you need to book a blood test,” or “You’re overdue for a check-in”.
The goal is to automate parts of therapy optimisation responsibly within agreed protocols, thereby turning static guidelines into dynamic, personalised action. We can also move upstream: if you have diabetes, better management today could help prevent heart failure or myocardial infarction in the future. Prevention comes as a series of timely micro-interventions that add up to the bigger picture.
We should also be clear about risks. Asking people to track symptoms could provoke cardiac anxiety in some. We don’t yet fully understand that effect, so we’ll measure it, learn and adapt. Good digital care is not about passing responsibility onto the patient; it’s about empowering them with support that’s clinically meaningful and proportionate.
What this means
For individuals, the benefits are tangible with fewer wasted hours parking and waiting for an appointment. There should be more flexible at-home interactions, clearer prompts and a single place to track data, access information and communicate with clinicians. People who feel involved in their healthcare tend to adhere better, and adherence saves lives.
For the system, the gains are significant. Pre-visit data means shorter, higher-value appointments. Risk-based triage (think red/amber/green) helps us focus scarce face-to-face time on those who need it now, while safely monitoring those who don’t. Earlier detection of deterioration reduces emergency department visits and readmissions. Integrated records cut down on duplication, letters, phone calls, and the weeks-to-months bureaucratic chase for information, particularly in inherited conditions where family data scattered across trusts currently costs time that we don’t have.
The future of CVD care
Over the coming years, we can expect three big shifts in cardiovascular care aligned to the 10 Year Health Plan.
First, AI-assisted decision-making. Risk stratification, diagnostic support and next-step prompts that combine imaging, ECGs, laboratory data and patient-reported outcomes into something clinicians can act on quickly.
Second, remote monitoring and wearables at scale. Continuous, real-time feedback from virtual wards looped into clinical teams and used to drive self-management and adherence to provide actionable signals.
Finally, precision and genomics. Increasingly, targeted approaches (including gene-focused therapies) will complement digital care to personalise prevention across families and populations.
Thread those together and you get a connected ecosystem that aligns with the three pillars. The priority and alignment to the plan is clear. We need to redesign digital first, remote patient management and heart care around people’s lives, then let data do the heavy lifting.
