Healthdame Empowering Patients in the New Health 2.0 Era

Telemonitoring’s Key Ingredient for Success

Patients are increasingly able to cut back on doctor’s visits by using home monitoring devices that collect vital signs such as blood glucose, weight, and blood pressure, and send that data electronically to their doctor.  Telemonitoring, as it’s called, is taking off both because of technology improvements and the need to cut the cost of managing chronic diseases like diabetes and heart failure.  But it is never enough to just plug in a device. The key is to get patients to change behavior.  That’s the hardest thing to do.  Most patients just ignore the stream of numbers flashing across their home monitoring devices.

It’s people, particularly the monitoring nurses, who must still connect with the patient and get them to react to those flashing numbers.  That’s when real change can happen, according to this interesting post from Kathy Duckett, BSN, RN, and Director of Clinical Programs at Partners Home Care.

“We hear that telemonitoring changes lives.  That’s the hype, but the reality is different.  Telemonitoring, in and of itself, doesn’t change lives.  Telemonitoring is really just a 21^st century biofeedback service.  Remote monitoring combined with the “just in time” teaching provided by our telemonitoring nurses give our patients the information they need to decide if they want to change their lives,” Duckett writes.

She explains that patients need to have “aha” moments, such as, when they connect an eating binge to weight gain, or too many sweets and a rise in blood glucose. When it comes to following health advice, patients “read the booklets we gave them; they just didn’t really believe us.”

Telemonitoring should help us cut health costs, by reducing visits to the doctor, but what I like most about it is the idea of helping patients to really understand how much control they actually have of their health, even when dealing with something as devastating as heart failure.  Duckett titled her post “Riding the Bus or Taking The Wheel — The Telemonitoring Choice.”  Hopefully, more of us will take hold of the wheel.