Home Health & Hospice Week

If you want to improve your patients' care,you may want to take a page from these providers' technology playbooks.

Saddleback Memorial Medical Center in Laguna Hills, Calif. reduced readmissions of congestive heart failure patients by 50 percent under a new program using home care telehealth devices combined with patient education and other components, it says.

"The results from the CHF program are truly impressive when you consider that a significant percentage of our patients are elderly, have a range of comorbidities and are often uncomfortable with technology," says Saddleback's heart failure outreach care coordinator Laurie Carson.

The hospital is extending its telehealth program to chronic obstructive pulmonary disease patients next, it says.

Saddleback's program, which uses IDEAL LIFE remote monitoring devices, "helps me focus on the patients who need home visits, versus those who are more stable and can be managed telephonically," Carson says in a release. "We can then devote our resources where they are needed, having a greater impact without adding additional staff."

Another project: The Visiting Nurse Service of New York has received $1.2 million in funding from the federal Center for Technology and Aging to test information technology strategies to help cognitively impaired patients manage their medications, VNSNY says in a release.

"The average home care patient takes six to eight medications, with 20 percent taking nine or more," VNSNY notes. "Poor medication management has been identified as one of the most frequent risk factors leading to unplanned hospitalizations and emergency room visits."

An algorithm on VNSNY's visiting nurses' tablet computers will help the nurses, caregivers, and patients manage and reconcile patients' medications.

Telehealth Units Sit Idle

Technology can be a great way to help improve patient care, but not if home health agencies aren't using it.

About 23 percent of agencies report using telehealth systems -- up from 17.1 percent in 2006, according to "The BlackBerry Report: The National State of the Home Care Industry," released last October at the National Association for Home Care & Hospice's annual conference in Los Angeles. But 22 percent of those agencies report that less than 25 percent of their units are in use on any particular day.

Underuse of telehealth units varies by size of agency, said Robert Fazzi of Fazzi Associates, who reported on the initial analysis of the findings. Forty-eight percent of small agencies reported using less than 25 percent of their units on a given day, while only 4.9 percent of large agencies reported that amount of underuse.

Research in Motion Limited, Hospital Home Care Association of America, NAHC, and Fazzi Associates sponsored the study. They surveyed 900 senior executives representing agencies in all segments of the home care industry.