NHS' Self-Care Week highlights the difference telehealth can make in improving the health and well-being of everyone. The week is intended to promote the idea that that whatever your age and health, the best placed person to look after you - is you.
Telehealth Solutions offers the 'Home Pod', an iPad-like device patients can use to measure vital signs like blood pressure and lung function, answer symptom questionnaires and send the results to a nurse.
A carer can examine results remotely, and spot problems before they demand a hospital visit or ambulance call-out.
It means that doctors and nurses can have a more active role in what every patient must do to some degree: self-care. For those with long-term conditions like lung disease or diabetes, self-care makes the difference between another problem-free day and a trip to the emergency room.
By keeping patients out of hospital and at home, they enjoy a greatly improved quality of life, while the NHS saves costs.
It also means time with nurses and GPs can be spent on support, care and advice, instead of taking routine measurements.
In some cases telehealth reduced hospital admissions by over 90%, and cut home visits from the GP by half.
Jeremy Cummin, Executive Chairman of Telehealth Solutions said, "Telehealth and self-care are two sides of the same coin. With someone on the other end of a HomePod ensuring they're taking the right steps and making the right choices, patients are safer - and feel safer.
"The most important part isn't the lives saved or the increased efficiency for the NHS, it's the confidence and security that takes a patient from worrying about their health to enjoying life again."
Related news articles:
- Telehealth Solutions' Profile
About Telehealth Solutions
Telehealth Solutions was founded in 2006 to bring the convergence of technology and changing clinical practice to the benefit of patients and clinicians. The company has grown rapidly and now has 20 employees who are dedicated
to providing the most secure, scalable and robust methods for collecting information from patients, without the need for clinical intervention, and getting that information into the hands of the clinicians and carers who are looking after those patients.
Products in the THSL portfolio, which is explained in-depth on the firm's website www.thsl.co.uk, include:
- HomePod
- CardioPod
- SurgeryPod
- Check-in Pod
- CarePod
The Department of Health states that telehealth is the remote delivery of healthcare using electronic means of communication usually patient to clinician. For example, a patient measuring their vital signs at home and this data being transmitted via a telehealth monitor to a clinician. The principal benefits of telehealth are enabling great professional focus on patients, reducing anxiety, anticipating and, therefore, avoiding crisis admissions to hospital and improving medication compliance. The patient also becomes more informed about their daily health and is an active partner in their own healthcare. This use of technology is particularly good for remote and rural areas.