Validation of a flexible and innovative platform for the home monitoring of heart failure patients: Preliminary results

During the clinical validation of HEARTFAID, a platform of services for the medical-clinical management of heart failure (HF) in elderly subjects, performed in several European sites, special attention was paid to test Nurse@Home (N@H), a flexible and innovative application for the home monitoring of HF patients. This paper is focused on the validation performed in the sites of Catanzaro and Milan, Italy. In both validation sites selected patients, complying with the inclusion criteria, after giving written informed consent, were enrolled into the HEARTFAID platform and assigned to a home monitoring phase. The flexibility of N@H allowed the implementation of different telemonitoring procedures in each validation site. The flexible home monitoring, irrespective of the sensors used and of the transmission modality to the HEARTFAID platform, was generally well accepted and only minor difficulties were encountered. In Catanzaro, the evaluation of data coming from N@H was also useful to check two possible cases of decompensation The first results obtained put in evidence how the readiness of medical interventions on changes of the monitored parameters could be very important in order to prevent hospital readmission and to reduce health care costs.