Designing Patient-Centered mHealth Technology Intervention to Reduce Hospital Readmission for Heart-Failure Patients

In the US, approximately 5.8 million people suffer from Congestive Heart Failure (CHF). It is the most frequent cause for hospital readmissions such that 21.2% of Medicare patients diagnosed with CHF were readmitted to hospital within 30 days of discharge. Tele-monitoring daily self-management regimens may reduce hospital readmission. My Heart is a telehealth system, which we have designed for CHF patients to bridge the current gap in the Congestive Heart Failure care continuum when the patient moves to the home environment. The system uses wireless health devices and a mobile application to collect patients´ data, moreover, it sends messages to patients to encourage self-care as per Fogg´s behavior model. On the clinician´s end, we designed a rule-based expert system and a dashboard to process and display patients´ vitals, symptoms, and health risk. My Heart is currently being used at Loma Linda University (LLU) Medical Center and we report here our initial findings.