Evaluation of Remote Monitoring in Home Health Care

Remote telehealth monitoring has become a common practice in home health care in the United Sates. Further, there is growing evidence of the effectiveness of remote monitoring on patient outcomes. The Visiting Nurse of New York, the largest not-for-profit home health care agency in the country tested the impact of remote monitors on a sample of 132 patients compared to a matched control group (n=264). The results indicated that regardless of diagnosis, the rate of hospitalization for the control group was 45.5% and for the remote monitoring group it was 35.6%. The difference was not statistically significant (p=0.06). However, at the diagnosis level there were significant differences for congestive heart failure and hypertension patients. The diagnoses chosen for analysis were the most frequent (primary or secondary) among the remote monitoring patients with sample sizes greater than 20. Implications of these and other findings are discussed.