Description

Together, the ecg@home™ and RHMS is a powerful tool that offers great value far beyond that of a traditional 12-lead ECG. HealthFrontier has identified how the ecg@home™ can address the specific, individual needs of each of many different market segments, as described below.

Private Practitioners

The ecg@home™ an enables the private physician unprecedented control over the care of his or her patients. Currently when a patient presents concerning cardiac symptoms, the doctor is greatly limited in their ability to address these issues; namely they can send the patient out for a 12-lead ECG, or prescribe them an event recorder or Holter monitor. However, these solutions are intended as short-term solutions, and many times require the patient to wear leads for days or weeks at a time, greatly impacting the patient’s quality of life. Furthermore, it can be extremely difficult to catch symptoms that only appear intermittently, and frustrating for both the patient and physician who are forced to continue to endure tests until valuable information is finally captured. In contrast, the ecg@home™ and RHMS will enable the physician to:

• Monitor the patient over the long-term with a substantially decreased impact on quality of life.
• Catch events that only appear irregularly, with the secondary benefit that patients can now feel at ease that they will be able to capture their worrisome cardiac events
• Keep care of the patient in-house, and it allow them perform their own interpretation and analysis of the ECG strips if they so desire, or use an in-house technician if one is available.
• If the physician does not desire to interpret the readings, a third-party service can send the analyzed scans minutes after the reading is taken.
• Monitor the effects of changes in medication
• Access all the patient’s historical ECG readings with the click of a mouse through the RHMS, eliminating the need to search through a library of paper-chart printouts.

Visiting Nurses

Currently, visiting nurses already include 12-lead ECG care as one of many services provided for the care of patients in their own homes. In order to take accurate readings, the nurses must be highly trained in the proper protocol for lead-placement. Furthermore, the 12-lead system is a time-consuming process for an industry that depends on visiting as many patients as possible. Here, the ecg@home™ solution will:

• Enable the visiting nurses to provide the same level of care for their patients by continuing to offer at-home ECG tests
• Reduce the pressure on the nurses to place the leads with exact precision
• Gather the same valuable information on the 12-lead ECG strip, while utilizing a much simpler and easier process for both the nurse and the patient.
• The Visiting Nurses already have mechanisms in place in order to interpret the ECG strips, send it to the primary physician, and bill for care. The ecg@home™ will integrate seamlessly into this established system, while offering many improvements over the customary 12-lead test.

Sub-Acute Care

Sub-acute facilities focus on providing care right after a serious illness in a hospital, when the patient needs antibiotics or physical therapy while recovering. One of the most critical decisions health-professionals in this segment must make is whether a patient presenting cardiac symptoms is stable, or requires an ER visit. The decision to send the patient to the ER incurs many risks and costs, including transportation of the potentially unstable patient to the hospital, and standard fees associated with any hospital stay. The ecg@home™ allows these healthcare personnel to:

• Take ECG readings with far more speed than the 12-lead option
• Through the RHSM, readings can be quickly interpreted either on-site or by a third party scanning service, and returned to the originating facility in minutes.
• Determine the impact and effectiveness of the existing therapy regimen, and adjust regimen.
• Use the analyzed reading in deciding whether the patient requires emergency care.
• This solution offers tremendous saving potential by enabling the decision-maker keep patients out of the hospital when their conditions are non-critical, and to provide prompt medical attention when serious medical conditions are present.

Hospitals

The ecg@home™ is able to incorporate directly into pre-established telemedicine systems, and offers all the recognized ease-of-use improvements over the traditional 12-lead ECG method. One of its many uses will be to establish baseline readings of patients pre-surgery, and to monitor patients after an operation, especially if facility already takes advantage of telemedicine technology.

The ecg@home + RHMS

The ecg@home™ is powered by an IT backbone known as the Remote health Monitoring System (RHMS). Healthfrontier’s RHMS is a web-enabled software application that automatically receives, stores and forwards incoming ECG scans to a patient’s Electronic Medical Record, thus eliminating the need for paper printouts. For more information about the RHMS, click here.