Improving Health at Home: The Promise of Telehealth
<p>Remote patient monitoring―better known as telehealth―can be a highly effective approach to facilitate communication between patient and caregiver and to engage patients in managing their own care. These technologies remotely collect, track, and transmit health data from a patient’s home, or other care setting, to a health care provider or case manager in a different location.</p><p>A <a href="/publications/case-study/2013/jan/scaling-telehealth-programs-lessons-early-adopters">new set of case studies</a> by Andrew Broderick and colleagues at the Public Health Institute’s Center for Innovation and Technology in Public Health highlights three successful approaches to taking home telehealth programs to scale: </p>
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<li>The Veterans Health Administration, whose Care Coordination/Home Telehealth program demonstrates the possibility of implementing telehealth on a broad scale and achieving cost-effective, high-quality outcomes for chronic care patients. </li>
<li>Partners HealthCare, an integrated health system in Boston whose Connected Cardiac Care Program for heart failure patients is estimated to have generated total cost savings of more than $10 million since 2006 for more than 1,200 enrollees. </li>
<li>Colorado-based Centura Health at Home, which has merged a clinical call center with telehealth to improve outcomes for older patients discharged from the hospital. </li>
</ul>
<p>Visit <a href="/publications/case-study/2013/jan/scaling-telehealth-programs-lessons-early-adopters">commonwealthfund.org</a> to learn more about these early telehealth adopters and how they are improving patient outcomes while using existing health care resources more efficiently. </p>