A telehealth initiative at Charleston Area Medical Center led to reduced readmission rates for several chronic conditions, the health system reported today.
What led to the reductions wasn’t the advent of video consultations with specialists or sophisticated biometric sensor monitoring, but health information for patients and workflow integration for hospital staff via SmarTigr, TeleHealth...
Last month a study published in JAMA Internal Medicine made headlines and caused a few waves in digital health after concluding telemonitoring supported by a nurse call center intervention after discharge did not have an effect on outcomes for congestive heart failure patients. This week Dr. Joseph Kvedar, Vice President of Connected Health at Partners HealthCare, which was not involved in the...
Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center will soon become the latest hospital to incorporate health monitoring via connected devices and Apple’s HealthKit infrastructure. BIDMC @ Home, an initiative the hospital has been working on for the past six months or so, is currently being tested on doctors and IT personnel in the hospital and will roll out to its first cohort of patients in the spring.
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A retrospective matched-pair cohort study of 348 patients in Partners HealthCare's Boston-area hospitals shows that remote monitoring in congestive heart failure patients can reduce 120-day hospitalizations and mortality. Interestingly, while the reduction in mortality held beyond the 120 days of the study, the hospitalizations for the monitoring cohort actually went up after the monitoring...
Steward Health Care System's President Dr. Mark Girard, who spoke at the Digital Healthcare Innovation Summit in Boston this week, discussed how Steward's facilities use digital health tools to manage their patient populations.
According to Girard, there are two fundamental processes in healthcare, information flows and people flows. The ideal, he said, is for both processes to be happening at...
A connected weight scale from AMC Health.
A new study from Pennsylvania hospital system Geisinger Health Plan shows that remote monitoring of congestive heart failure patients can reduce readmissions by 38 to 44 percent and produce a return on investment of $3.30 on the dollar.
The long-term study of 541 patients began in 2008 and just concluded in 2012. Patients used a Bluetooth-connected...
A startup called Perminova is developing a necklace for clinical use that can track a number of vital signs including thoracic fluid levels, an early predictor of congestive heart failure that isn't currently monitored by most connected sensors. Patients at risk for CHF could use the device in place of or along with a weight scale.
"You have weight gain four days before a heart failure event," VP...
Erin Denholm
When applied to the right circumstances and with appropriate planning, remote monitoring can be highly effective at avoiding inpatient admissions and visits to the emergency room for patients with chronic diseases. As a bonus, investments in monitoring technologies and services often pay off quickly, attendees at the American Telemedicine Association's Fall Forum heard Monday in...
Last year healthcare providers remotely monitored about 308,000 patients worldwide for congestive heart failure (CHF), chronic obstructive pulmonary disease (COPD), diabetes, hypertension and mental health conditions, according to a recent report from InMedica. By 2017 that number should spike to 1.8 million patients, the research firm predicts.
InMedica found that the majority of patients are...
The Wall Street Journal published a feature on wireless health services and devices that payers across the country are currently piloting, including a note that in January Humana "will launch a program to track heart patients' vital signs wirelessly and link them up via video to chat with nurses if appropriate."
Perhaps the most interesting trend highlighted in the WSJ report is video chats...
