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Extending the range of
home tele-services that can be
brought to today's patients. |
July/August 2006
Telepalliative Home Care:
An Introduction to the Next Potential Wave of At-Home, Needed Telecare
 This installment of the Home Telehealth Community of Care on “telepalliative” home care (palliative care services delivered in part through telehealth tools) provides you with a view of what’s been tried and what’s working in this very new, developing field.
Palliative care, used here as health and comfort care services delivered in the interim between home health and home hospice admission periods should be and can be a long-term option. You read that correctly—should be and can be. Many have argued for either or both of these choices. Here’s more detail:
- In the palliative care “should be” long term school, are researchers and medical practitioners who see significant value in providing a continuum of care particularly to people living with complex chronic diseases. See an annotated bibliography here in the Making the Case for PC.
Note: For many following the field of home telehealthcare delivery, this is not news. Short-term admissions, long-term needs are well known problems. Telepalliative care may make for good “condition management”* and follow-through of at-home patients/ordinary people living with lifelong conditions and diseases.
*Condition management is a phrase coined by True Ryndes, President and CEO, The National Hospice Work Group. It refers to addressing the bigger picture of care for persons’ life-long condition-/disease-related needs.
- In the palliative care “can be” long term school, are those trying “tele” approaches that enable more frequent, less interrupted care service delivery. See Tele-Tool Use in PC for another annotated bibliography of articles describing tools that have been used for palliative care delivery. Though a departure from our usual tools-and-their- features identification segment, learning from reported studies that videophones, for example, have been used in telepalliative care delivery with both good and bad effect may be more useful information. As a start.
Experts who are addressing palliative care needs flesh out a broader picture of tele-service planning and delivery in our Look Homeward panel segment. And, more on PC how-to is noted here, in the PC Links.
Should we begin looking at telepalliative care as the next wave of at-home, needed care service delivery option? Convincing arguments for doing so are provided in the Coming Home segment, by True Ryndes, ANP, MPH, who among the many hats he wears to forward the cause of new technologies’ use in home, palliative, and hospice care, is an executive with the remarkably innovative San Diego Hospice and Palliative Care organization.
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