Tools of Telehospice: Just Like Being There, Some of the Time

Wide-ranging workstations that replicate the conventional on-site hospice visit have a range of features and differing pricing which require hospice agencies to investigate these thoroughly to ensure that the right fit is made between agency and patient and of course machine and patient.

Top among the full-scale workstations are these:

• Honeywell HomMedHealth Monitoring. This suite of devices enables full capture of hospice patients’ status using the Genesis Targeted Solution or the Sentry Total Solution. Collection happens in minutes.

Customer note: Beverly Gillund of Hendricks Hospital Home Care and Hospice in rural Minnesota stresses the value of using the system to provide “as-needed” care, taking a proactive approach based on the telemonitored information received regularly from her patients.

• McKesson offers the McKesson Telehealth Advisor, which focuses on disease management and uses the Health Buddy appliance for easy patient-nurse interaction. It’s a clinical tool which enables both objective and subjective responses (through telemonitoring, and through questions and answers with the patient): in all, it provides a constant presence, even between visits. In addition, its Horizon Hospice Connection ASP system provides advanced tracking and reporting to ensure that every member of the hospice team understands the patients’ status at any moment.

Additional, supplementary tools are available as well. For instance, a wide range of educational/instructional videotapes takes a show-and-tell approach to showing hospice patients and their family caregivers the many tasks that must be performed. These tasks may be transferring a patient; managing medications; and/or caring for patients with urinary incontinence. Nurses will have already shown them these tasks in person—the value of the tapes is that they can repeat, remind, and reinforce what nurses have already done on site, providing peace of mind for patients and family caregivers. See, for instance, the range of tapes from The Home Care Companion.

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