Remote telemonitoring of cardiovascular patients: Benefits, barriers, new suggestions

Abstract

Remote telemonitoring systems have been designed as a response to the new needs of home care for patients with chronic diseases. It also has the potential to ensure appropriate monitoring and treatment of patients as well as reducing the healthcare costs. Telemonitoring has been shown to be able to significantly improve the treatment outcomes of many chronic diseases, including pulmonary disorders, diabetes, hypertension, and cardiovascular diseases (CVD). Despite the promising results of telemonitoring systems regarding patient management and healthcare costs reduction, usage of this innovative technology is not as widespread as we would expect. The major barriers responsible for this are: unawareness and non-compliance of health care providers and patients, insufficient reimbursement of telemonitoring system expenses by National Health Service (NHS) and health insurance companies, unclear business models and also high costs of making necessary adjustments to change from more conventional systems to the new ones for the healthcare providers. These concerns should be addressed when designing and producing new telemonitoring systems. The focus has to be on making systems that are more user friendly, cost effective, durable with better safety standards. There should be a lot of effort to gain the support of the NHS and health insurance companies as well as to train and educate patients and health care providers in order to make them more compliant. Moreover, specific considerations must be made for special needs groups such as the elderly, those with impaired mental health or the ones that do not have access to computers easily.

Keywords

• Telemonitoring
• Telemedicine
• Telehealth
• Home monitoring
• Chronic diseases
• Cardiovascular diseases