Extending the range of home tele-services that can be brought to today's patients.

 

March 2005
Focusing on the Home First in Home Telehealthcare

The home… Key for getting home telehealth delivery to work

This installment of the Home Telehealth Community of Care focuses on the home today and what’s available there now for patients newly assigned to telehealth. We’re asking and we all should: What else could easily and affordably be placed there to make the home care safe and comfortable for today’s telehome care patients?

[Note: Longer term care and modifying the home to make a better fit will be a topic of our September Community of Care installment.]

Assessing today’s home for telehealth
Assessing the home as an accessible and safe environment is an important first in home telehealthcare planning and delivery. How do we do this? Try following this outline from our recent policy book as a suggested initial step to clearly determine what’s physically there and where.

Patient assessment for telehealth—of course this is needed, too, for evaluating, for instance, whether the patient can walk safely to the telehealth machine, and remember to use the machine and do so correctly. Get grounded in the importance of these concerns: Take a look at some writings on safety issues and telehealth in the home.

We’re talking about the gap between usual home assessment for any type of home care (is there a working telephone line and electricity?) and patient assessment for receiving care at home (can they be vertical, as needed, and alert?). The gap? It’s the particulars of today’s patients, many of whom are living with multiple chronic diseases’ symptoms of failing eyesight, and limited mobility and dexterity. This population likely needs more help with telehealth routines beyond being shown how to affix a blood pressure cuff and send readings by phone lines.

Needed: Additional tools

In our New Tools segment, you’ll get introduced to several low-tech devices which can assist with home telehealth service delivery. Few are glitzy, all are affordable (often under $20.00 per device). These tools are worth looking into when needed adjustments have to be made so that telehealth devices can and will be used easily by today’s elderly patients.

Our Look Homeward segment provides case illustrations of workarounds in home assessments gathered from home telehealth providers who are working on this still-frontier territory. Look for our Special Feature here: a home assessment and Variation Tracking Tool so necessary for keeping close tabs on what’s there in the home and what’s needed.

And, special to the Coming Home segment, Michael J. Rosen, Ph.D., home telehealth device designer and teacher sends the telehealth salespeople to the very back of the room and provides the rest of us with encouragement and advice on what all of us need to become familiar with home health technology to make it work.

New Tools Beyond a paper assessment of the home: Keys to making telehealth work

Coming Home We’re all still learning how to use telehealth the right way—thank goodness there’s someone very knowledgeable to remind us that this is the case. Required reading—from design engineer Michael J. Rosen.

Look Homeward Making a daunting task of getting the house “right” has to rely on the ordinary and familiar… See what several providers have found to work. Special FEATURE Patients’ homes can be as varied in regards to needs and capabilities as the patients themselves. Home health industry expert, Joan Hazlip, MS, RN, of VNA First, recommends we use this home Variation Tracking Tool to ensure that, despite many differences in many homes, telehealth will work in all of them.