The reality of home remote patient monitoring: A thesis on the nature, dynamics and effects of telehealth
Chronic diseases are very complex conditions in which two or m ore disease processes may coexist. Managing patients with chronic conditions represents a major challenge to public health, since eighty per cent of GP consultations are related to these groups. Further more, five per cent of them represent roughly forty two per cent of the total acute day bed occupancy. Nowadays, the tendency is to bring patients from high levels of care to primary care and home settings. In this scenario, telehealth is one of the methods that can be used to improve and provide access to remote patient monitoring at home. This is important for patients with chronic diseases as it can help to recognise any signs of deterioration, provide health education and support management of their condition. Potentially, telehealth can reduce deaths, emergency visits, A&E visits, elective admissions, bed stays and costs. This can be done by designing and implementing telehealth interventions that help reduce unnecessary referrals to specialised services and monitor patients remotely at home. However, there is not a unique framework for designing telehealth interventions. In order to design a robust, accurate and reliable telehealth intervention, a number of important factors have to be taken into account. A review of three systematic reviews, and an in-depth investigation of a case study based on an EU funded project, were used to gather the evidence for telehealth interventions. These were used to identify the main components of the framework proposed. The investigation focused primarily on home monitoring for patients with diabetes, asthma, hypertension and COPD. We concluded that factors such as usability, safe intervention, patients’ individual requirements, training, safe interventions, ease of use, data integration, development of procedures and allocation of appropriate staff are important components that need to be considered in order to satisfy a robust framework.
RA Public aspects of medicine, Z665 Library Science. Information Science
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