Telehomecare is a patient self-management program that engages patients as partners in their care plan - right in their home. Telehomecare Nurses teach, coach, and remotely monitor a patient’s health status through the use of technology.
OTN
![]() | Among the many score of floral tributes at my great grandfather’s funeral – he had eight devoted children – was a full-sized rocking chair made entirely of flowers. Leaning against one arm of the chair, a floral version of his cane. They were emblematic of the last decade of his life; it was the way we always knew him, saw him. He was 88 when he died.
I often think of his life and his death as I chat with various sandwich-generation friends who are exhausted and defeated by the responsibility they feel for their aging parents.
How different are their parents’ last chapters than my great-grandfather’s or even my grandparents’. Having worked hard all of their lives, they were... |
I probably shouldn’t be telling this story.
It starts in 1968. According to (brilliant) researcher, surgeon and writer Atul Gawande, in that year, The Lancet published findings that represent one of the most important medical advances of the last century. It was just this: David R. Nalin and Richard A. Cash, American researchers in Dhaka during a cholera outbreak, added sugar to salt and water hydration and administered it orally to 29 patients. Cholera deaths: zero. Sugar, it seems, helps the gut absorb fluids.
Cholera pandemics killed millions in the nineteenth century. Even after intravenous fluids reduced mortality to 30 per cent in the early years of the twentieth century, globally, most people died, especially in places where... | |
![]() | I’ve had jobs that made me cry – don’t ask – but this may be the first time I’ve had a job that caused me to make other people cry.
With a lot of help from other team members, I make videos and write stories about Telehomecare. I talk to patients and their family caregivers, their nurses or respiratory therapists and doctors. From time to time, we visit patients in their homes. That’s where Telehomecare connects them with a clinician who monitors their vital signs remotely and coaches them about how to live their best possible life.
Then we tell their stories on screen, in news stories and on our web site so that people – and health care providers – learn about the program and how it can... |
Who could have imagined, even a few years ago, that holding a fingertip to your mobile phone screen would tell you your blood pressure? Yet, today, you can buy any one of a number of apps that does just that.
There’s only one problem. You’re most likely not getting an accurate blood pressure reading.
“Not ready for prime time,” is how Dr. Nilay Kumar described the technology to Reuters Health last month. Kumar is an attending physician at the Cambridge Health Alliance in Cambridge, Mass., and a Harvard Medical School instructor. He’s lead author on a study that analyzed the top 107 apps for “hypertension” and “high blood pressure”. Most – about 75 per cent – were found to... | |
Telehomecare is focused on supporting patients with long-term chronic diseases. As our population ages, more and more people are living with chronic diseases, which means they’ll be seeing physicians more and going to the hospital more. This results in higher costs for the healthcare system. So the healthcare system is looking for ways of supporting these people to live optimally with their chronic disease, and to minimize the need for them to engage with the healthcare system. The Telehomecare program is a way of helping people understand their illness better, and to self-manage their chronic disease without the need for interacting with the healthcare system.
A Telehomecare... | |
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