Sometimes the best mHealth solutions are the simplest ones.
That's the take-away from a study recently conducted at two New Jersey hospitals in which 10 Stage C heart failure patients were monitored at home through a simple text message-based program. The three-month study, using DocView mHealth Solutions, resulted in no readmissions.
"It's really a pretty simple solution," said Lance Roman, chief operating officer of Cherry Hill, N.J.-based DocView, who will be presenting the study at next week's Heart Failure Society of America meeting in Orlando, Fla. "People in mHealth tend to over-engineer these things, when really all you need to do is streamline."
The study was conducted earlier this year through the Atlantic Health System's Heart Success Program at Morristown Medical Center and Overlook Medical Center in Morristown and Summit, N.J., respectively. The 10 patients involved were enrolled in DocView's program, through which they received via text message a set of carefully worded, disease-specific questions regarding their health. The questions, which generally took less than a minute to answer, were sent back to the care team, which decided if they warranted further action.
According to officials, of the 381 documented patient check-ins, 109 required additional evaluation or intervention, usually in the form of a text message sent back to the patient from the care team.
"These were questions that normally would take anywhere from a nine- to 25-minute phone call," said Roman. "But in this three-month period, there were zero phone calls. The questions were answered, the (care teams) could see whether the patient was OK or if there were any early signs of something more serious."
Roman said the study was deliberately kept at 10 patients because the care team wanted to start small – and because they weren't convinced that a program that didn't rely on phone calls would work. With the success of the program in the books, he said, DocView is now working on a much larger pilot with the Cleveland Clinic and fielding calls from dozens of hospitals "who see the need for this type of technology."
'Everyone looks at this backwards," said Roman, who sees the DocView platform as helping to reduce readmissions and improve medication adherence. Those results aren't achieved through better education, he argued, but through regular interaction with the patient's care team.
"Really, it's all just small talk," he said, echoing comments he'd heard from a nurse who'd used the program. "But it's those interventions that make the difference."
