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Medical Leader News - Telehealth coming to Home Health: In-home device will enhance quality of careTelehealth coming to Home Health: In-home device will enhance quality of care
PIKEVILLE — Pikeville Medical Center has entered into an agreement with McKesson Corporation to add the McKesson Telehealth Advisor solution to its list of patient services. As the name suggests, McKesson Telehealth Advisor is a remote disease management monitoring solution. But, it is much more than simply a monitoring system.
The McKesson Telehealth Advisor solution is on the cutting edge of Telehealth technology by providing two-way communication between healthcare providers and patents.
The system consists of an in-home device known as the Health Buddy that collects and transmits information and advanced analysis tools. All of the information then becomes a part of the patient's electronic record for improved care oversight management, enhanced patient self-management and improved outcomes.
“The McKesson Telehealth Advisor solution will be a great addition to the services we can provide our patients,” Betty Conley, R.N., Director of Home Health at Pikeville Medical Center said. “It will help us monitor and track patient well-being on a daily basis and help patients take better care of themselves — both of which will improve patient outcomes.”
Pikeville Medical Center Home Health will roll out the system to a small group of [diagnosis i.e. CHF or other criteria] patients and gradually expand the program from there.
The McKesson Telehealth Advisor solution was just one of several Telehealth systems Pikeville Medical Center investigated before making a final decision. The key differentiator for PMC was the McKesson Telehealth Advisor solution’s disease management content.
The system offers more than 30 standard disease management programs — both for individual diagnoses and co-morbidity. Each daily session presents questions that use branching logic to personalize the dialogues to meet the patient’s demonstrated knowledge level and responses. For example, if the patient responds, “Yes” to a question about whether they experienced pain that day, it is followed by a question asking the patient to rate the severity of the pain.
This educational information is delivered via the Health Buddy, which also collects vital sign information. Weight scales, blood pressure and blood glucose devices can be attached to the appliance for electronic reporting, or the patient can self-report vitals by keying them into the Health Buddy. By collecting this information on a daily basis rather than just on those days when the clinician visits the home, Pikeville Medical Center’s Home Health Agency will eliminate the information gap inherent in the traditional home visit model.
“The McKesson Telehealth Advisor solution will allow us to track patient health trends in far more detail and on a real-time basis,” Brenda Newsom, R.N., BSN, who is overseeing the program, said.
The McKesson Telehealth Advisor solution has extensive, Internet-enabled decision support tools that provide trending, reports and risk stratification for more accurate resource utilization and efficient patient monitoring. It color-codes patient responses and trends patient data over time, which will give PMC’s Home Health Agency a snapshot of the patient population and the risks associated with them.
This will help Pikeville Medical Center easily identify possible at-risk patients for proactive intervention before a patient’s condition becomes acute.
The benefits to patients are obvious; however, it will also be a big help to PMC’s Home Health Agency as well. By improving patient wellness tracking, the agency will be able to target expensive home visits to potentially reduce exacerbation of symptoms and hospitalizations.
Additionally, one clinician will be able to watch over far more patients than is possible with the traditional in-home visit model.
Newsom will lead the initial rollout of the McKesson Telehealth Advisor solution. A team of clinicians will be closely involved in the implementation. “We are looking forward to using Telehealth to help lead us into the future,” Newsom added.
Telehealth Program benefits include:
• Allows one clinician to oversee widespread and diverse patient population on a daily basis
• Gives every patient an efficient, user-friendly personal information appliance that delivers a wide variety of additional support services including patient education, positive patient behavior reinforcement, connection to the health care team, and other related diseaseappropriate support
• Encourages patient selfmanagement behaviors and medication compliance for improved outcomes
• Monitors the actual degree of compliance with recommended behavioral changes, as well as monitoring treatment and disease progression
• Provides motivational feedback to the patient, with rewards for compliance and correction for non-compliance
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