Te Whatu Ora Te Matau a Māui Hawke’s Bay is piloting remote patient monitoring (RPM) to reduce travel times and the length of patient hospital stays.
Operations manager rehabilitation and support Amy Williamson says the first phase of the pilot ran for 16 weeks and was “largely successful”. They are now in the second phase, which is running until the end of June.
“With a large region, we want to use technology to our advantage. Using RPM can assist with reducing travel time for our health workforce, and also safely reduce the length of time patients need to be in hospital,” she says.
The pilot is focused on two groups of patients from either Hoki ki te Kāinga, an early supported discharge service, or cardiology patients supported by a Rural Nurse Practitioner.
Patients were selected if they had further to travel, or required a higher degree of clinical monitoring, and were deemed suitable by their healthcare practitioner.
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In phase one, 20 Hoki ki te Kāinga patients and six cardiology patients were monitored remotely using Spritely software.
Patients were given a tablet with 4G capabilities and Bluetooth devices pre-paired with the tablet such as scales, blood pressure monitor, thermometer and pulse oximeter.
Williamson says this pre-pairing removed some of the common barriers for telehealth products such as computer literacy and access to data.
Data from the devices is monitored by kaimahi (staff), and any out of normal range results trigger alerts.
She said Hoki ki te Kāinga patients saved an average of three hours’ travel time per patient, or 60 hours in total.
The team was also able to provide an early clinical intervention for four patients, preventing them from having to go back to hospital.
The cardiology trial had two successful, fast and safe up-titrations for patients (whereby a low dose is administered initially and is increased over time to achieve a specific response), and another two patients who did not have to be admitted to hospital as a result of the alerts triggered through the software.
Williamson says the Hoki ki te Kāinga team made some tweaks during phase one of the trial, such as swapping to tympanic (temperature measured via the ear) thermometers from forehead monitors.
The team also learned that the pilot wasn’t appropriate for patients with dementia.
Learn more about RPM in the Hawke's Bay by watching the video below.
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