Originally Published MDDI
June 2003
NEWSTRENDS
Using Remote Patient Monitoring to Support Home Healthcare |
| The MedStar system provides a simple interface between caregivers and patients in the home. |
Over the past decade healthcare delivery has gradually shifted from the hospital bedside to outpatient care to home care. Home care has typically involved periodic visits by a nurse or other caregivers and has often required patients to maintain detailed records of various types of data, such as glucose levels and blood pressure. Now, a new system that uses advanced data collection in concert with remote video communications could simplify home healthcare practices.
Cybernet Medical (Ann Arbor, MI), which develops biometric monitoring technology and medical devices for outpatient care, has combined its MedStar Disease Management Data Collection System with next-generation videotelephone products from StarView Video Communications Corp. (Tucson, AZ). The resulting system can be used to collect and transmit the physiological data of patients with chronic diseases such as diabetes, asthma, hypertension, and congestive heart failure (CHF). A high-resolution camera can be used to digitally bring a healthcare provider into the patient’s home. According to Cybernet, this close yet remote form of patient contact can be beneficial in wound-care management and in chronic disease monitoring requiring face-to-face interaction with a healthcare provider.
Says Cybernet’s Eric Lichtenstein, the MedStar can currently be connected “to off-the-shelf home-use medical devices, like a glucose meter, blood pressure cuff, weight scale, pulse oximeters, or a spirometer.” He adds that the system also performs standard EKG, functioning somewhat in the manner of a Holter monitor.
Lichtenstein says the key to the device is that it is a passive system in many ways—requiring little from patients beyond pushing one button. He says, “They just take their blood pressure, they step on the scale, they take their glucose measurement on the peripheral devices. Then the MedStar automatically collects that data from those devices and sends it up to a secured HIPAA Web site where the physician and nurses and healthcare staff can get access to not just that one data point, but the history of that patient.” By eliminating the patient’s subjective data record, the system also provides a more accurate patient record, he adds.
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