Guardian Home Care Holdings, Cardiocom provide home telehealth technology to patients with chronic illnesses

Jun 7 2010

Guardian Home Care Holdings, Inc., a leading provider of home care and hospice services, announced it has entered into a business relationship with Cardiocom® to provide advanced home telehealth technology to patients with chronic illnesses.  Cardiocom is a developer, manufacturer and clinical service provider of award-winning telehealth solutions.

Cardiocom's Commander Telehealth System provides an interactive opportunity to proactively manage patient care. The system guides the patient through an interactive "health check" that includes the collection of symptoms, care plan compliance, and vital signs such as weight, blood pressure, oxygen saturation and heart rate.  This information is immediately transmitted over a standard phone line or a cellular signal to the patient's nurse for review.

"It's estimated that three-fourths of all health care spending is associated with patients with one or more chronic health conditions.  Many of these patients are homebound seniors served by home care agencies like ours.  It's imperative that we find effective ways to keep them healthy at home and out of expensive institutional care.  We chose the Cardiocom telemonitoring system because we felt it provided the best opportunity for our company to impact the quality of care we deliver and help our patients maintain their independence at home, "said Judy Bishop, CEO of Guardian.

Bishop added that telemonitoring will increasingly become more important as all health care providers move toward "Value Based Purchasing," meaning quality patient outcomes will equal higher Medicare reimbursement.  Hospitals, for example, will be penalized for hospital readmissions.

"When a chronically ill patient returns from a hospital stay, that's when they are most fragile and susceptible to complications.  Research indicates that early home care use reduces Medicare post-hospitalization by billions of dollars.  Having the ability to immediately monitor these patients with telehealth technology will give our nurses a tremendous tool to enhance patient care and save the government a lot of money in the process," she said.

SOURCE Cardiocom