Increasingly, many older people who live alone are not truly alone. They are being watched by a flurry of new technologies designed to enable them to live independently and avoid expensive trips to the emergency room or nursing homes.
Bertha Branch, 78, discovered the power of a system called eNeighbor when she fell to the floor of her Philadelphia apartment late one night without her emergency alert pendant and could not phone for help.
A wireless sensor under Ms. Branch’s bed detected that she had gotten up. Motion detectors in her bedroom and bathroom registered that she had not left the area in her usual pattern and relayed that information to a central monitoring system, prompting a call to her telephone to ask if she was all right. When she did not answer, that incited more calls — to a neighbor, to the building manager and finally to 911, which dispatched firefighters to break through her door. She had been on the floor less than an hour when they arrived.
Technologies like eNeighbor come with great promise of improved care at lower cost and the backing of large companies like Intel and General Electric.
But the devices, which can be expensive, remain largely unproven and are not usually covered by the government or private insurance plans. Doctors are not trained to treat patients using remote data and have no mechanism to be paid for doing so. And like all technologies, the devices — including motion sensors, pill compliance detectors and wireless devices that transmit data on blood pressure, weight, oxygen and glucose levels — may have unintended consequences, substituting electronic measurements for face-to-face contact with doctors, nurses and family members.
via Sensors Help Keep the Elderly Safe, and at Home – NYTimes.com.
Remote monitoring can improve the condition of mobile heart failure patients and may reduce hospital readmissions, according to a pilot study that included 150 patients admitted to Massachusetts General Hospital in Boston.
The patients, average age 70, were randomly selected to receive usual care for heart failure (68 patients) or remote monitoring (42 patients). Forty of the patients declined to participate. The study was conducted by the Center for Connected Health, a division of Partners HealthCare.
via Home Monitoring Program Improves Outcomes for Heart Patients – washingtonpost.com.
Updated research on RPM technologies, emphasizing the cost effectiveness of RPM use compared to standard care and disease management practices, as well as remaining barriers to its adoption.
via Remote Physiological Monitoring: Research Update – Publications – NEHI.
Of late, research has increasingly shown that remote monitoring devices that feed clinical data to providers can have significant benefits. For example, one recent study concluded that when clinicians monitor congestive heart failure patients remotely, they can cut re-hospitalization rates for such patients by 60 percent.
Results like these have driven providers to test a wide range of remote monitoring devices, including devices tracking patients weight, blood pressure, oxygen and glucose levels, as well as others tracking medication compliance. This has taken place despite the fact that most health plans dont pay for such devices as of yet–and theyre not cheap, either.
That being said, experts have already begun to warn that such devices, while beneficial, could generate more data than physicians can manage. While nurses can screen incoming data, physicians are ultimately responsible for patient management, and the volume of data remote monitoring generates can be formidable. This is likely to become a big issue as remote monitoring gets cheaper and more effective.
via Home monitoring devices poised to create flood of data – FierceHealthIT.