A very important positive shift in attitude to digital health

April 24, 2015 | by

Hat tip to Mike Clark for alerting this editor to a particularly important run of recent papers on digital health that suggests that we have at last turned the corner from the seemingly endless enquiries of the “does it work?” type, to asking instead “how can it be made best to work?”.

We’ll start with perhaps one of the most unequivocal papers on the benefits of telehealth this editor can remember – a review by a team from the Mayo Clinic of controlled trials between 1990 and 2014 of digital health for managing cardiovascular disease. It is entitled “Digital Health Interventions for the Prevention of Cardiovascular Disease: A Systematic Review and Meta-analysis”. The results found were that “digital health interventions significantly reduced CVD outcomes”. It makes great reading. Another smaller academic study of an NHS Croydon implementation for both CHF & COPD also showed positive results, and strong patient appeal specifically, too.

Another paper, just published by Stephen Agboola of Partners Healthcare, and colleagues from Boston US, entitled “Heart Failure Remote Monitoring: Evidence From the Retrospective Evaluation of a Real-World Remote Monitoring Program”,  further supports the benefits of telehealth for managing CHF. However, benefits disappeared after the 120-day telehealth usage ended, as discussed by Jonah Comstock of mobihealthnews – important lessons to be learned there, relating perhaps to what follows in this post.

(Though not an academic study, it’s worth perhaps also recording en passant a Health Recovery Solutions (HRS) claim that they reduced the 30 day readmission rate for 130 congestive heart failure patients by 53%, from 8.0% to 3.8%, over a period from July 2014 to February 2015.)

Moving on then to a paper by Trisha Greenhalgh and colleagues entitled “What is quality in assisted living technology? The ARCHIE framework for effective telehealth and telecare services”. This paper concludes that (more…)

The end of an era – is this Mike Clark’s last newsletter?

March 27, 2015 | by

Ardent followers of Mike Clark’s newsletters will be saddened by the news that the current funding from Innovate UK, KTN Ltd and the Assisted Living Innovation Platform to support the extensive work he does to keep us all informed of important stuff has come to an end.

The Telecare LIN is therefore looking to its readers. To maintain a comprehensive monthly news summary going out to over 48,000 people, they are looking to crowdsource funding to support the website, content and hundreds of links and journal article references each month. They are currently looking for a number of organisations to support continuing production (including supplements, Twitter stream, archive) at around the £5k level per year. The news service, currently in its tenth year is recognised as an authoritative source and valuable resource in the UK and in other parts of the world working on digital health, telehealth, mHealth, telemedicine and telecare.

More details, and who to send the money to, are on the first page of the newsletter.

Mike will also be appearing in person (more…)

A tale of two chessboards

January 28, 2015 | by | 2 Comments

Things happen ever faster on the second half of the chessboard. No sooner had the ink dried on our predictions for 2015, and Dr Eric Topol told the story of the first patient to call him with a smartphone diagnosis than Alivecor announced that they now have CE certification for their AF-diagnosing app.

Mind you, whilst Dr Topol might welcome this, it seems that others are still on a different chessboard: under the heading “Doctors fear that new health tech is turning UK into a nation of “worried well””, a recent survey of UK doctors showed that “Seven out of ten (76%) GPs said they had noticed a marked increase in number of patients “self-diagnosing” from the internet over the past twelve months” suggesting, in the words of 1066 & all that, that technology is a Bad Thing. What, this reviewer wonders, will be the reaction to (more…)

Mapping assisted living and integrated care & support work in the UK

February 14, 2014 | by

We don’t normally draw readers’ attention these days to items of news unless we have a comment to make, as Twitter, and most notably Mike Clark’s excellent & timely tweets (@clarkmike), fulfils that role well.

However the Assisted Living Capability Map is just so good it perhaps merits an extra mention to readers. Click on any region on the map and it will give you details of all assisted living activities in that region known to the HealthTech and Medicines KTN.

The same is true of the Integrated Care & Support exchange (ICASE) map with shows integrated care & support pioneers, initiatives & case study exemplars. It is not, sadly, designed with the 10% of men who struggle with red/green colour blindness in mind, although that’s a small criticism of an excellent piece of work.