The UK’s National Institute for Health and Care Excellence (NICE) has published guidelines calling for the use of a remote heart monitoring pathway in people with cardiac implantable electronic devices, such as pacemakers, living with heart failure.
NICE is recommending the use of a Manchester University NHS Foundation Trust (MFT) developed pathway, TriageHF Plus, which the public body claims can dramatically reduce the number of hospitalisations due to heart failure. Developed alongside Medtronic, the system uses real-time data to automatically alert the hospital team when a person’s condition becomes potentially high risk.
The approach takes advantage of the monitoring abilities of devices such as pacemakers, that send and receive patient data. Patients are given a simple transmitter box that is attached to a phoneline which automatically sends alerts from the patient’s pacemaker to the heart failure team at a hospital if any potentially dangerous or abnormal readings are identified.
Fozia Ahmed, consultant cardiologist at MFT said: “I am delighted NICE has recommended the use of the TriageHF Plus pathway which will have a positive impact on patients across the country.
“We routinely see patients with heart failure in the hospital clinic for a check-up every six months, but we know that their condition can deteriorate rapidly between appointments. Having an automatic system that alerts us to early signs of deterioration enables us to intervene quickly, preventing hospitalisations and potentially deaths, due to heart failure.”
When clinicians do receive an alert from a patient using the Triage HF monitoring system, they will know to immediately contact the potential patient to follow up and address any potential issues.
Research studying 758 participants with heart failure across three hospitals in Greater Manchester, including Manchester Royal Infirmary and Wythenshawe Hospital, found the system was able to cut hospitalisations throughout the trust by 58%, according to research published earlier this year in the European Society of Cardiology (ESC) Heart Failure Journal.
Ahmed added: “It is about using the technology contained within these devices to their full capability and developing pathways in the heart failure service within the hospital to ensure we can act on alerts we receive quickly. This is something we have pioneered in Manchester and have proven that this is replicable and scalable across different hospitals.”
Elsewhere in the world of remote patient monitoring, the CEOs of Pfizer and Eli Lilly have received letters from four US senators expressing concerns about their new direct-to-consumer (DTC) telehealth platforms. Meanwhile, Dynocardia has announced that it has been the recipient of a National Institutes of Health (NIH) grant totaling $500k to advance its own wrist-mounted wearables.
