Anyone doubting the benefits of clinical mobile access, read on…

June 13, 2014 | by

Yes of course it is a survey produced by a supplier, so possibly a trifle biased, however EU News’s  item on the benefits of mobile access by community health people makes a very strong case for good access to clinical information when visiting patients that makes sense.

Notable quotes include:

Lack of access to patient information in real-time is affecting the ability of 88% of community health workers to perform their roles…

70% of participants said mobile working technology had resulted in greater patient involvement in care and the management of conditions, and had also improved the quality of visits, with more time focused on treatment.

Almost a fifth of respondents said they spent more than ten hours a week, the equivalent of more than two hours per day, on a combination of travelling back to base to file reports, and other administrative tasks – time that could be spent providing enhanced patient care or home visits.

Don’t be put off by the title…take II (and take your pick II)

August 26, 2013 | by

Following on from yesterday’s post entitled “Don’t be put off by the title, or the conclusion, of this review of reviews“, Mike Clark has kindly pointed me towards another recent review of telehealth reviews entitled “Telehealth – the effects on clinical outcomes, cost effectiveness and the patient experience: a systematic overview of the literature”, this time from Salford University, authored by Dr Alison Brettle, Tamara Brown, Professor Nicolas Hardiker, Jon Radcliffe and Christine Smith.

This paper provides an intriguing contrast to the paper reviewed yesterday in a couple of, doubtless unrelated, ways. Firstly, whilst the word that was the subject of yesterday’s post does not appear in the title (it does appear in the text), the paper was funded by an educational grant from the organisation most often associated with that word. Secondly, the review is noticeably more positive, for example:

“There is more evidence for some conditions than others, but on the whole the trends are largely positive suggesting that telehealth is effective in:

  • Reducing patient mortality and hospital admissions for chronic heart failure
  • Reducing hospital admissions for COPD
  • Reducing blood pressure in hypertension, improving glycaemic control in diabetes and reducing symptoms in asthma”

As with our two recent posts on Birmingham OwnHealth, it looks like it’s take your pick time again.

It is perhaps just worth adding that there are also significant similarities between some of the observations made in both papers, most notably about the small size of many trials, inconsistent collection of outcome measures and the weaknesses of the methodologies currently used for assessing the effectiveness of trials of medical devices.