home > services > diseases> congestive heart failure

CONGESTIVE HEART FAILURE

Home telemonitoring serves three important functions for patients with congestive heart failure. First, it enables clinicians to safely titrate beta blockers and other drugs with fewer home nursing or office visits. Second, it provides an early warning when patients begin to decompensate, enabling physicians or case managers to adjust medication and employ other interventions before a problem escalates to a crisis. Third, it provides rapid feedback to the patient, demonstrating and reinforcing the value of adherence to medical recommendations.

Our telemonitoring service alerts clinicians when patients send critical readings, enabling them to manage by exception, focusing their efforts only on patients who need attention. Clinician caseload can be increased without increasing the workload. Healthcare organizations can rapidly implement our telemonitoring service without making a capital investment, adding staff or installing new software.

Telemonitoring Protocol for Congestive Heart Failure
A patient typically monitors blood pressure, heart rate and weight every morning. If needed, diabetic patients also monitor blood glucose. After monitoring, the patient sends readings over the telephone to our data center by pressing a single button.

Our Interactive Voice Response (IVR) system reviews blood pressure and weight, tells the patient if there is any change from the previous readings, and offers congratulations if the readings are at goal. The IVR then asks symptoms questions, selected by the patient’s clinician. Finally, the IVR reminds the patient to take and send readings tomorrow.

Telemonitoring for congestive heart failure will improve patients’ functional status, reduce home nursing visits and hospitalization, and increase the efficiency of case management. It can be easily integrated into existing disease and case management programs. In clinical trials, telemonitoring with nurse case management reduced hospitalization 50-88%.^1,2