BackTelemonitoring Advances Home Care Practices
Article submitted by Alacare Home Health & Hospice.
For more information, they can be reached at 888-252-2273, or visit their website: www.alacare.com.
Some Birmingham area seniors are using a new cost-effective way to help manage their health from home. Called telemonitoring, the system gives home healthcare patients a daily check-up seven days a week.
Each morning the telemonitoring system uses a recorded voice which greets the patient and instructs them to automatically take readings for blood pressure, pulse, oxygen level, weight, temperature and even blood glucose measurements. These vital signs are crucial in monitoring patients suffering from hypertension, chronic heart failure, diabetes and other serious health conditions.
"Our telemonitoring system allows Alacare Home Health & Hospice to evaluate a patients' medical condition on a daily basis. This enables our nurses to effectively and properly monitor patients so we can spot small problems and treat them appropriately before they become big problems," says John G. Beard, MBA/JD, President of Alacare Home Health & Hospice.
In the first month of using the telemonitoring system, one of the Alacare Home Health & Hospice nurses monitoring a patient recognized that his blood pressure readings were abnormally high and erratic. Even the patient's symptom of swelling was documented automatically by questions asked by the telemonitoring system and answered by the patient using a touch-tone phone. The readings prompted the nurse to call the patient's physician who was puzzled by the symptoms, which should have been controlled by a recently prescribed Beta-Blocker. The nurse then called the patient's wife who suddenly realized that she had forgotten to have the prescription filled. "Because of the earlier detection by use of the telemonitoring system, we were able to quickly identify the problem, which kept the patient out of the hospital," says Carol Pearce RN, MSN and Alacare Home Health & Hospice Special Projects Manager.
Federal guidelines allow companies like Alacare Home Health & Hospice to offer telemonitoring to their Medicare insured patients for free. This is allowing home telemonitoring to emerge as a low-cost effective way to prevent emergency room visits and hospitalizations.
In a clinical study, unmonitored patients were hospitalized at a rate almost twice as high as that of telemonitored patients. Even more dramatic was the difference in emergency room visits: Unmonitored patients needed emergency care five times more often.