Telehealth specialists Tunstall have teamed up with Milton Keynes Primary Care Trust and Milton Keynes Community Alarm Service to help give patients suffering from conditions such as chronic obstructive pulmonary disease (COPD), to live healthily and independently at home.
The trust hopes that the move towards monitoring patients from their homes will save them up to £450,000 usually spent on emergency admissions and treatment for patients with long term conditions.
Tunstall’s director of health, Matthew Marshall, told E-Health Insider Primary Care: “Milton Keynes PCT were existing customers of ours and wanted to take a step up from using telecare to adopting telehealth. The trust noticed an obvious need to look into the telehealth products to help keep long term condition sufferers at home, where they can be safely be seen to and looked after from a distance. Success at social services level helped boost this, and the trust approached us to install our equipment.”
Genesis monitors from Tunstall were provided to patients with COPD to support a more proactive and preventative model of care.
The monitor lets patients measure their own vital signs such as heart rate, weight, blood pressure and oxygen levels, and also asks a range of clinical questions to further determine a patient’s condition.
Fatima Holt, the registered general nurse for the district nurse team within Milton Keynes PCT said: “The telehealth pilot is a revolution in care for my COPD patients. Historically these types of patients presented themselves to us in very acute stages of their care. It was not uncommon for them to begin feeling ill, allow this to develop for 3 or 4 days then contact us when they were in a very serious condition. In the majority of these cases we had to admit these patients into hospital.
“We have now transformed this situation and because of the telehealth monitors we are able to see the start of an exacerbation in the early stages and take appropriate proactive care. I am convinced we need to roll this out into all our chronic disease areas.”
Since launching the telehealth service, 26 hospital admissions have been prevented in just four months, reducing the burden on acute, primary and community sectors.
Clinical results are monitored by Milton Keynes Community Alarm Service’s telecare team and nursing staff are notified if assistance is required, ensuring early intervention and avoiding hospital admission.
Marshall said: “It’s becoming increasingly useful to be able to offer patients the choice of telehealth. We have a more and more ageing population and patients really like having the freedom to be able to look after their own well-being at a safe distance away from a healthcare setting. Milton Keynes appreciated this and so looked at offering this to as many patients as they could afford to.”
A key benefit of the initiative is educating users to be more aware of their own symptoms and to proactively manage them, helping to reduce some of the burden on healthcare providers.
Tunstall is supporting the Department of Health’s early adopter programme for telehealth and Marshall says that more and more NHS sites are now beginning to look at telehealth seriously: "“Telehealth truly is the dawn of a new market. Every week it picks up pace, and it is a natural progression for those who already provide telecare. We are actively involved in the three early adopter sites and see them as a major catalyst for the market."
Marshall added: “Ideally, I’d like to think that by the time the results for the pilots are formally announced, it will be almost a no-brainer for trusts to invest in telehealth, and the whole pilot experience will be seen as an official rubber stamp for the technology. Trusts are beginning to find the funds to invest in telehealth and we are excited at the prospects ahead in this field.”
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