Background: Recent evidence indicates that home telemonitoring of chronic patients reduces the use of healthcare resources. However, further studies exploring this issue are needed in primary care.
Objectives: To assess the impact of a primary care-based home telemonitoring intervention for highly unstable chronic patients on the use of healthcare resources.
Methods: A one-year follow-up before and after exploratory study, without control group, was conducted. Housebound patients with heart failure or chronic lung disease, with recurrent hospital admissions, were included. The intervention consisted of patient's self-measurements and responses to a health status questionnaire, sent daily from smartphones to a web-platform (aided by an alert system) reviewed by healthcare professionals. The primary outcome measure was the number of hospital admissions occurring 12 months before and after the intervention. Secondary outcomes were length of hospital stay and number of emergency department attendances. Primary care nurses were mainly in charge of the telemonitoring process and were assisted by the general practitioners when required.
Results: For the 28 patients who completed the follow-up (out of 42 included, 13 patients died and 1 discontinued the intervention), a significant reduction in hospitalizations, from 2.6 admissions/patient in the previous year (standard deviation, SD: 1.6) to 1.1 (SD: 1.5) during the one-year telemonitoring follow-up (P <0.001), and emergency department attendances, from 4.2 (SD: 2.6) to 2.1 (SD: 2.6) (P <0.001) was observed. The length of hospital stay was reduced non-significantly from 11.4 to 7.9 days.
Conclusion: In this small exploratory study, the primary care-based telemonitoring intervention seemed to have a positive impact decreasing the number of hospital admissions and emergency department attendances.
Keywords: Organizational innovation; chronic diseases; healthcare resources use; primary care; telemonitoring.