iCardio: The Brazilian Population-Based Real-World Data Platform for Cardiovascular Disease

Technological advances that contribute to improving organizations and systems’ capability to manage care services and pathways are impactful in improving efficiency and reducing waste in health care. This narrative paper presents the implementation of iCardio, a dashboard of population real-world data-based analytical online open-access solution for the cardiovascular field in Brazil. The platform was developed using hospitalization data from patients who underwent cardiovascular operation or interventional procedures, identified by procedure codes reimbursed by the public health system. Patient-level data from hospital and mortality systems were provided by the Brazilian Ministry of Health, cleaned, and organized into individual-level and hospitalization-level datasets to enable parameter calculation. A web-based solution was developed to provide user-friendly, interactive access to 17 indicators relevant to evaluating cardiovascular service efficiency, quality, and equity. Data from 291,490 patients with 317,338 index hospitalizations and 375,809 procedures (172,874 of cardiovascular operations and 202,935 of interventional cardiology) performed in 558 health care centers in Brazil compose the dataset behind the platform. The platform offers 4 analytical views: “patients,’ profile,’’ “by location,’’ “procedure rates,’’ and “detailed exploration,’’ displaying data by year (2019-2020) with multiple stratification options (eg, patient characteristics, procedures, health care centers, and geography). The iCardio is an online open-access platform based on real-world data that provides ready-to-use information about cardiovascular care in Brazil, which can be used as a transformative tool to sustain data-driven health policies and research in the cardiovascular field in Brazil.