It’s as small as a bathroom scale and its computerized voice reminders sound like the recording for directory assistance, but its benefits, including peace of mind, are immeasurable for Hallmark Health Visiting Nurse Association (VNA) and Hospice’s patients with telemonitoring machines in their homes. This state-of-art technology, which has been instrumental in reducing re-hospitalizations, assesses weight, blood pressure, oxygen levels, heart rate, and other health indicators. As a result of the program’s success, the agency is now offering the service on a private pay basis to patients who had been on the Telemonitoring Program and to those who have not had visiting nurse services, but who would benefit from daily health monitoring.

Hallmark Health VNA and Hospice introduced the telemonitoring program to its patients three years ago as an accompaniment to traditional home visits. Today, close to one hundred patients are utilizing the Honeywell HomeMed Telemonitoring device, enabling the agency to better monitor them through daily reminders and instruction on performing vital measurements. Patients on the program have various health issues, ranging from high blood pressure to cardiac disease.

At various programmed times during the morning, more than one hundred patients take their vital signs while a Health VNA and Hospice Telemonitoring Nurse monitors this information from the central monitoring station at the agency, located in Malden. “The telemonitoring equipment is easy to use and takes no more than ten minutes,” explains Maureen O’Neil Murphy, RN, BSM, Telehealth Coordinator at Hallmark Health VNA and Hospice. Once a patient takes his vital signs, this information is passed electronically to the agency’s monitoring station. A cardiac nurse, who has extensive telemonitoring experience, reviews this information, and, if an abnormality is detected, the nurse immediately calls the patient to conduct an assessment, provide education, and determine if there is a need for a home nursing visit or if the patient’s physician should be contacted.

“Our goal is early intervention, and decreased hospitalizations and emergency room visits through better patient management,” says Maureen O’Neil Murphy, RN, BSN, Telehealth Coordinator at Hallmark Health VNA and Hospice. “With daily monitoring, we can work with the patient’s physician to be more pre-emptive in patient care, allowing for quick adjustments to medications or treatment plans in response to a change in condition,” she explains. “In addition, telemonitoring helps patients better understand their condition and better comply with their physician’s orders.”

For patients who privately pay for the service, telemonitoring provides peace of mind, because they know that a nurse is reviewing their health status and vital signs on a daily basis and is available for questions if the need arises, says O’Neil-Murphy. She explains that children of patients on the private pay telemonitoring program, particularly those who some distance away, also find comfort in having telemonitoring in the home. “They know that through this specialized program, even a small changes in their parent’s health could be detected early, possibly preventing an emergency room visit or more serious issue.”

The agency recently completed a yearlong study on the effectiveness of telemonitoring in reducing re-hospitalizations of patients. It found that those patients using the home telemonitoring system had an eighteen percent re-hospitalization rate as compared with the general population, which has a thirty-six percent hospitalization rate. “These findings demonstrate that patients using this technology in their homes have better health outcomes and require less expensive hospital stays,” says O’Neil-Murphy.

Telemonitoring has become the standard of care for the majority of Hallmark Health VNA and Hospice cardiac patients. However, O’Neil-Murphy stresses that it is a complementary tool to the traditional home visit. “ It is not meant to replace nurses or hands-on-care. Nurses will still visit to access, teach, and support our patients," she says.

For further information on utilizing the Telemonitoring Program on a private pay basis, please call Janet Pesce, manager of the Best Care Program of Hallmark Health Visiting Nurse Association and Hospice, at (781) 338-7804.