Could Remote Health Monitoring Cut Healthcare Costs?

November 12 01:00 2015 by ushadmin

Remote health monitoring continues to be an important method of care among physicians and other healthcare professionals who have included the practice among their heart disease patient base. Nonetheless, many doctors continue the follow-up appointment instead of using remote health monitoring tools after a patient has had a cardiac device installed through surgery.

Remote Monitoring Technology

In a study published in the Telemedicine and e-Health journal, researchers compare the typical follow-up appointment to that of immediately using remote health monitoring technology among patients with heart disease.

The researchers looked at the benefits of remote health monitoring alongside of office visits and follow-up care as compared to these services without the home-based monitoring tools. Also, the study focused on overall health outcomes as well as patient satisfaction.

“Data were collected in four moments: two in-office visits and two remote evaluations, reproducing 1 year of clinical follow-up. Data sources included health records, implant reports, initial demographic data collection, follow-up printouts, and a questionnaire,” the paper related.

“Clinically, 15 events were detected (9 by remote monitoring and 6 by patient-initiated activation), of which only 9 were symptomatic. We verified that remote monitoring could detect both symptomatic and asymptomatic events, whereas patient-initiated activation only detected symptomatic ones (p=0.028).”

Among the clinical subjects, 15 patients from 63 to 74 years old were followed who exhibited 15 separate cardiac events. These events were detected via remote health monitoring technology and patient-initiated activation.

By administering a survey, the researchers uncovered high levels of patient satisfaction. A total of 67 percent of clinical subjects stated having high satisfaction ratings with the use of remote health monitoring while 33 percent stated having very high satisfaction with these technologies…