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TELEMONITORING IN RURAL HEALTH CARE

Our services enable patients with diabetes, hypertension, pre-eclampsia, congestive heart failure and other cardiovascular diseases to monitor their vital signs and symptoms at home, and to send their clinical information to doctors and nurses by toll-free telephone, without the need for the patient or clinician to have a computer or specialized training.

Home telemonitoring is a powerful tool to remotely assess blood pressure, weight, heart rate, blood glucose, medication compliance and symptoms. It enables clinicians to treat serious medical conditions remotely with fewer face-to-face interactions. Remote access to vital signs and symptoms, often on a daily basis, has been demonstrated to improve health outcomes, serve as an early warning system to prevent catastrophic events and reduce the cost of health care.

In an urban setting, care is typically delivered in a physician’s office or by a nurse traveling to the patient’s home. For many rural patients, this access is not available; telemonitoring is the only practical way to achieve the benefits of care enjoyed by patients in urban areas.

Those benefits are often dramatic. Telemonitoring can enable a pregnant woman with pre-eclampsia to remain at home for the full term of her pregnancy instead of spending long periods traveling to and staying in a distant hospital. For a patient with congestive heart failure, telemonitoring is an early warning system, alerting patient and clinician to a dangerous condition early enough to avert a crisis. By helping patients with hypertension control their blood pressure, telemonitoring prevents strokes, heart attacks and kidney failure.

Telemonitoring addresses two other critical problems in rural health care: dramatically rising costs, and a severe shortage of nurses. A visiting nurse can typically make two or three rural home visits a day to check vital signs and symptoms, teach patients self-care methods, and review medication. If a nurse visits each patient once a week, he or she can care for 15-20 patients at a time. With telemonitoring, the same nurse can check vital signs and symptoms of 50 or more patients, deal with many issues over the telephone, and visit the few who require a face-to-face intervention. Several studies have shown that telemonitoring with nurse case management improves health outcomes and reduces costs.

Telemonitoring eases the strain on nursing resources in rural areas, because fewer nurses are needed to handle a given caseload. A managed care organization that offered LifeLink Monitoring’s blood pressure telemonitoring service to its patients with pre-eclampsia reduced home nursing visits by more than 50%.¹

According to the director of disease management of a large health plan, "In rural areas, where members might be quite far from a hospital or physician, it allows early intervention to get patients care they need before they get into real trouble."²

Some federal grants are available for telemonitoring programs in rural health care. For more information about federal grant programs for telemonitoring, contact:

John Holland
888-595-8080 ext 203

¹ LifeLink Monitoring data on file, 2001-2002.
²Disease Management Programs Come Slowly to Rural Health Plan Enrollees. Managed Care Week July 12, 2002.