Digital readiness for cardiovascular care in high-burden US communities with cardiology workforce constraints.

Among high cardiometabolic burden census tracts in US counties lacking cardiologists or with declining per-capita supply, 18.0% (4,765 tracts) had higher digital readiness and were deployment-priority.

• Why it matters: Digital cardiovascular care could help where specialist access is limited, but it requires local infrastructure, devices, affordability, and capacity that are not captured by county-level workforce targeting.
• What they did: The study linked national data on cardiometabolic burden, cardiology workforce, and digital readiness across 82,999 US census tracts, then classified tracts into deployment- versus investment-priority using readiness thresholds.
• The result: Investment-priority tracts accounted for 82.0% (21,752 tracts) and 74.1 million residents, with barriers varying by adoption versus infrastructure and frequent within-metropolitan geographic variation.

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