A mention on the UK-based counterpart of this site, ace healthcare IT consultant Colin Jervis' FuturehealthIT blog, caused me to pay more attention to a couple of posts on remote monitoring that treated it in considerable depth and very thoughtfully.
Meanwhile, back on this side of the Pond, remote monitoring seems to be on everyone's mind recently. This past week's FierceHealthIT e-newsletter had an editorial on remote monitoring with some good insights into the challenges one can expect when venturing into this cutting-edge arena. Getting into a collaborative relationship with patients is more difficult than it first appears.
According to FierceHealthIT:
A few years ago, Canadian researchers designed and rolled out a PDA-based glucose monitoring tool for Type 1 diabetes patients. The idea was to test whether this tool, in combination with clinical monitoring and support, could help rural families better manage blood sugar levels for children diagnosed with Type 1.
As it turned out, the new management approach didn't work well. Families faced a wide range of technology problems, including PDA problems, glucometer failures, glucometer/PDA synchronization issues and communication failures between the PDA and ISP. Some of the families had trouble even connecting with the ISP, given the spotty connectivity available in their rural location. And if all of that worked, patients and families didn't always have the energy to stick with the program.
Colin Jervis's FutureHealthIT blog had a post called Healthcare on Wireless Waves that was preceded by another entitled Telemedicine and Self Care. The earlier post took a realistic yet optimistic look at the possibilities of remote monitoring. For example:
Supported by monitoring centres, self-management of chronic illness is real option. As an example of its possibilities, [Director of the telemonitoring service Xenetec] Dr. [Paul] Johnson referred to work by Dr Dean Ornish et al on the effect of diet, exercise and stress management on heart disease. Dr. Ornish's work assessed the power of a rigourous risk management regime to arrest—or reverse—the progression of atherosclerosis.
It's nice to see medicine moving out of the clinic and into the real world, where the rest of us live.
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