UPMC provides in-home telehealth equipment to promote proactive patient self-care, monitoring patients’ key measures, providing patients with easy access to guidance about their health issues, and enabling physicians to follow their patients’ health.
Since nurses cannot be in the patients home 24 hours per day, telehealth remote heart monitoring provides significant benefits for heart failure patients, their families, and their physicians.
Nurses outside the home remotely monitor patients and proactively recognize potential health risks.
The Telemedicine Heart Failure health kit, containing a tablet and peripheral devices, has reduced readmission rates and emergency department visits for monitored patients with congestive heart failure. Reducing hospital admissions reduces costs to insurers, patients, and potentially non-reimbursable events for hospitals/facilities.
Monitoring results in better patient compliance (medication, diet, daily measures), resulting in better long-term care for the patients. The compliance often results in a direct correlation to avoided emergency department visits and inpatient admissions.
Patients can manage their illnesses from the comfort and convenience of home.
The Telemedicine Heart Failure health kit is designed to identify warning signs earlier. The health kit offers continuous care regardless of geographic location. Each patient is provided with a tablet device that wirelessly transmits information to the call center.
The user-friendly health kit works anywhere in Pennsylvania and is provided to patients for a period of 90 days.
Remote monitoring is not a replacement for emergency services. In case of emergency, patients must call 911 or their local emergency services.