Effects of Remote Patient Monitoring on Heart Failure Management

Poor management of heart failure (HF) has added to the high costs and negative health outcomes from this chronic illness, including frequent hospitalization. HF patients require close monitoring to detect worsening health and to optimize their treatment. However, many patients visit their HF clinicians only once every few months, and perform minimal or no self-monitoring.

Remote patient monitoring is a potential tool to help clinicians and the patients better manage HF. A remote patient monitoring system (home monitoring of vital signs and symptoms) that has been developed with extensive clinician and patient input and testing, will be studied to determine its effects on HF management. Half of one hundred patients from the University Health Network Heart Failure Clinic will be randomly placed into the remote monitoring (RM) group and the other half will be in the control group. Patients in the RM group will monitor their weight, blood pressure, ECG, and symptoms at home for 6 months. This information will be automatically sent from the medical devices wirelessly through Bluetooth to a mobile phone, which will send the information to the data servers. Both clinicians and patients will have access to the data. Patients will get automated reminder telephone calls if they do not take the number of measurements prescribed by their doctors.

Inclusion criteria

• Clinical diagnosis of Heart Failure (NYHA Class II-IV)
• Out-patients attending the University Health Network Heart Failure Clinic
• English-speaking and able to read English
• 18 years old or over

Exclusion criteria

• Awaiting heart transplantation
• Not expected to survive over a year (as determined by their cardiologist)
• Unable to read text on a mobile phone due to vision disability
• Unable to self-care due to anxiety, depression, or decreased cognitive function
• Lack of manual dexterity to accurately press buttons on the mobile phone