Patients’ use of self telemonitoring in 21st century
clinical care in the community
Dr Paul Johnson explains how continuous telemonitoring can be
used by the public to detect risk and avert the course of serious
disease at an early stage.
keywords: telemetry, public
health medicine, disease indicators, patient-centred care, holistic
self-healthcare.
abstract
The UK is at a crossroads and the form of modernisation of the NHS,
particularly its use of IT, will be critical in determining the health
of the nation. Prioritising continuous physiological telemonitoring is a
major opportunity for the future NHS to place equality of self-care in
the hands of the public. In this way the NHS can be transformed to place
wellbeing and risk prevention at the core of healthcare, reversing the
trend of inequality of care and the increasing disease consequences of
the deteriorating lifestyle of the nation — particularly those
associated with social disadvantage.
The national service frameworks are all based on generic
health-promotion standards that are unmet by the current NHS, and are
not deliverable without recourse to radical IT-supported change in
service provision. The public must play an active part in self-care if
the ‘fully engaged scenario’ envisaged by Wanless is to be achieved.
Examples of the impact of wireless physiological monitoring in
antenatal care and heart failure are used to illustrate the generic
clinical and IT features of such a service that exist across health
promotion, as well as disease prevention and management. It is argued
that the radical changes in healthcare enabled by modern ICT urgently
require one or more community wide demonstrators to evaluate the impact
of IT on healthcare and inform the NPfIT.
Br J Healthcare Comput Info Manage 2004; 21(1): 22–6. |
