Almost all of the participants in a recent study say they felt more connected to their healthcare providers and more confident in managing their condition at home through a mobile care management platform.
In addition, more than half of the heart failure patients enrolled in the study, conducted by Boston-based Partners HealthCare, had almost 90 percent adherence to their daily care plan through the iGetBetter system, which included a web portal, telephone calls a personal connected health devices that collected important vital signs.
"The fact that over half of our study population had 89 percent adherence to their daily care plan for the duration of the study is very encouraging and unprecedented when compared with other web-based self-management programs for heart failure," Kamal Jethwani, MD, MPH, senior director of connected health innovation at Partners HealthCare and the study's principal investigator, said in a press release. "We believe the portable, user-friendly devices and wireless technology used in this study played an important role in improving engagement."
[See also: Partners looks to make patient engagement persistent]
The three-month study involved 20 ambulatory, clinically stable adults with heart failure, with a median age of 53 years, and was conducted at the outpatient clinic of the Massachusetts General Hospital Heart Center's Failure and Cardiac Transplant Program. Each patient was given a Bluetooth-enabled weight scale and blood pressure cuff to take their own vital signs, and were given an iPad Mini equipped with cellular connectivity to see their results online.
Officials said the study size was too small to forge wide-ranging conclusions, bu the results were promising.
“Our study results failed to achieve statistical significance due to the small sample size, but the trends across all outcomes are encouraging, and a future well-powered study could show vast savings in readmission costs,” Stephen Agboola, MD, MPH, a co-investigator on the study and a research scientist on the Connected Health Innovation team, said in the release.
"This is an important study evaluating the use of a web- and telephone-based remote monitoring program using portable, wireless and easy-to-use personal connected health devices to engage heart failure patients in self-managing their disease outside of the hospital setting," Joseph C. Kvedar, MD, Partners HealthCare's vice president of connected health, said in the release. "While additional study is required, we are quite encouraged by the results and believe that mobile-based, heart failure self-management can play an important role in improving disease management and clinical outcomes."
According to the study, 55 percent of those participating consistently viewed their data on the online web portal, with 64 percent logging on every day. More than 80 percent said the portal was helpful and easy to use.
Perhaps most importantly, 16 of the 20 participants said they believed their heart failure was better managed as a result of using the mHealth platform.
Partners officials compared the study results with control groups identified through the health system's EMR, and found that hospital use was comparable between the two groups, but the mean duration of hospital stays for unplanned admissions for the control group was more than twice as long as that of the study group. The study group also recorded fewer 30-day readmissions, though Partners officials noted the difference was not statistically significant.
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