Remote Monitoring News

How Remote Home Monitoring Improves Engagement, Elderly Care

While patient engagement did increase with the use of remote home monitoring tools, the study results also show that telemonitoring effects on the overall health of patients remained inconclusive.

By Vera Gruessner

- Remote home monitoring continues to boost patient engagement with their overall health and adherence to provider recommendations for managing their chronic medical conditions, according to a study on telemonitoring published in the Journal of the American Medical Informatics Association (JAMIA).

Remote Home Monitoring Technology

While patient engagement did increase with the use of remote home monitoring tools, the study results also show that telemonitoring effects on the overall health of patients remained inconclusive. Four chronic medical conditions were studied under remote home monitoring including hypertension, pulmonary conditions, cardiac disease, and diabetes.

Nonetheless, the results did find that remote home monitoring reduces emergency room visits and hospitalization rates among pulmonary and cardiac disease patients.

Additionally, length of hospital stay was decreased as well. Patients diagnosed with diabetes or hypertension, however, did not experience the same outcomes with the use of remote home monitoring equipment.

Nonetheless, the study authors conclude that remote monitoring technology is able to improve patient engagement and empowerment, bring about reliable and correct data, and even enhance patient health outcomes.

In general, new technologies incorporated in the healthcare field lead to increased longevity around the globe. With health outcomes improving and more people falling into the aging population, the healthcare industry is stuck facing larger numbers of elderly patients and continually in need of technological solutions.

Remote home monitoring and telemedicine services are some quick methods for ensuring patients across all populations receive adequate access to care despite any potential doctor shortages.

“Dramatic increases in the numbers of chronically ill patients in the face of shrinking provider numbers and significant cost pressures mean that a fundamental change is required in the process of care. We need to identify patient management approaches that would ensure appropriate monitoring and treatment of patients while reducing the cost involved in the process,” the study authors wrote.

“Provision of care directly to the patient home represents an alternative. It may be perceived as a substitute for acute hospitalization, an alternative to long-term institutionalization, a complementary means of maintaining individuals in their own community, and an alternative to conventional hospital outpatient or physician visits.”

“Information technology can play a crucial role in providing care to the home, and telehealth technologies have been growing dramatically. More precisely, home telemonitoring is a way of responding to the new needs of home care in an ageing population,” the authors concluded.

As remote home monitoring becomes a mainstay in geriatric care, it is also important to address the rise in risk-based monitoring. A major reason that many clinical research organizations around the globe are adopting risk-based monitoring strategies is due to decreased monitoring costs, according to a survey from the Metrics Champion Consortium.

The Food and Drug Administration along with the European Medicines Agency are recommending risk-based monitoring strategies as a system for reducing the costs associated with 100 percent source data verification.

The global survey included four main respondent profiles including pharma, biotech, CRO, and academic research institutes. The survey results show that 55 percent of respondents from North America are using risk-based monitoring strategies while 39 percent plan to use risk-based monitoring tools in the future.

Other reasons for the increased use of risk-based monitoring across the medical space is due to the need for higher quality data, better quality oversight, and stronger focus on patient safety.

Along with these results, 28 percent of survey respondents stated that they plan to incorporate central analytics in managing risk-based monitoring strategies over the next year. Additionally, 66 percent of respondents are using electronic data capture and 56 percent have incorporated clinical trial management systems in their everyday use.

Clearly, remote monitoring strategies continue to impact the healthcare field in a wide variety of ways from managing clinical trials to elderly care. It is believed that remote home monitoring will play a major role in medical care as the baby boomer population continues to age.

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