Health Care : Current Reviews

At home telemonitoring in an elderly, chronically ill Australian population moving towards national deployment

Global Summit on Telemedicine & eHealth

August 17-18, 2015 Houston, USA

Marlien Varnfield

Australian e-Health Research Centre, Australia

Posters-Accepted Abstracts: Health Care: Current Reviews

Abstract:

Telehealth Home Monitoring for aged care is Australia�??s first multi-state, multi-site matched-control trial (Before-After- Control-Impact (BACI) design) of telehealth services for chronically ill patients living in their own homes. Eligible patients (NTest=108; NControl=159; > 50 years old) with a history of unscheduled admissions to hospital for their chronic conditions were recruited across three distinct groups with two sites as hospital based services and three sites as community based services. Test patients were provided with a home-telemonitoring health device which they used over an average of 9 months. The trial concluded in early 2015 and final analysis of the data is currently in progress. These include statistical data analysis, evaluation of the application of biomedical signal analysis, predictive analytics and decision support. Results will be presented and we believe that home telemonitoring will show reduced incidence of unscheduled hospitalization as well as improvement in the management of chronically ill patients leading to better and more cost effective care. We envisage that the effect of telemonitoring may be different in different settings and our analysis will include subgroups of patients and subgroups from sites where different factors could potentially impact on the results. The outcomes from this project will help set policy frameworks and funding packages to assist in progressing to large-scale national deployment of telehealth services in Australia.

Biography :

Marlien Varnfield has completed her PhD research at Monash University, Department of Health Care: Current Reviews 2015, 3:1 & Preventive Medicine; Australia. Her research focuses on the development, delivery and large scale implementation of mobile health services. Specifically, she has extensive experience in care models designed to deliver support in the self-management of chronic conditions such as cardiovascular disease and diabetes to patients at home. In addition to numerous national and international conference presentations, she has widely published in the field of chronic disease self-management and mobile health.

Email: marlien.varnfield@csiro.au