mHealth Leads To Better At-Home Monitoring
By Katie Wike, contributing writer
When patients leave the hospital and head home, they don’t take their doctors with them. But mHealth may be the solution to keeping chronically ill patients in constant contact with their physicians.
By Katie Wike, contributing writer
Chronic diseases are often only monitored monthly by doctors, for obvious time and travel restrictions. But what if there were some way for those suffering from chronic conditions to keep in touch with their doctors and monitor their health from home? mHealth could be the answer.
Scott Flacks, COO of Ideal Life, a Toronto-based provider of customizable wireless health management monitors, will be speaking at the mHealth Summit in December about just that. According to mHealth News, Flacks feels telemedicine and telemonitoring are “the healthcare of the future. In the end, it’s all about keeping the patient healthy and out of the hospital.”
A recent study out of the University of California Department of Medicine found remote monitoring and telephone-based nurse coaching intervention reduced hospital readmissions among patients with heart failure. Flacks says researchers studied randomized cases to evaluate the transition. This included pre-discharge education about heart failure and post-discharge telephone nurse coaching, as well as with home telemonitoring of weight, blood pressure and heart rate.
Another study, from Geisinger Health Plan, found monitoring patients with congestive heart failure through telemedicine led to as much as a 44 percent reduction in readmissions.
Health IT Outcomes reported last month that the mHealth market is set to grow to $41 billion by 2020 and experts credit much of its growth to chronic disease management. Diabetes, obesity, sleep disorders, and cardiovascular disease are just some of the conditions contributing the 65 percent annual growth rate.
Read about new FDA approved remote patient monitoring HERE.
Learn more about Flack’s presentation at the mHealth Summit HERE.