CHF Home Telemonitoring: A Home Telemonitoring Service for Chronic Heart Failure Patients on Trial

Providing patients with chronic heart failure (CHF) access to remote monitoring, for example by telephone or telemonitoring using wireless technology, reduces deaths and hospitalisations and may provide benefits on health care costs and quality of life. Remote monitoring of patients with chronic heart failure can reduce pressure on resources, particularly for conditions like chronic heart failure, which exert a large burden on health services. These are conclusions of the Cochrane Systematic Review from 2010. In Norway the costs for treatment of chronic heart failure are vast, both concerning hospital treatment, daily use of medication over years, and loss of quality of life for patients and their family caregivers. Generally there is little knowledge about what is gained for the billions used. In Norway no telemonitoring services are established and hence no investigations have yet been published. Thus it seems that current evidence of effectiveness and quality is insufficient to recommend usage. The structure and funding streams in Norwegian health services are different from other countries and the conventional services that the intervention has been compared to in previous studies, are most likely heterogeneous. It is thus important to investigate Norwegian conditions. Advanced telemonitoring technology with electronic transfer of physiological data such as blood pressure and weight is currently being used in research and established routine services in several countries in Europe, amongst them the Netherlands, Germany and the United Kingdom. The proposed project intends to introduce such a strategy as an avenue for exploring promising new services that would not otherwise be available in Norway. The service consists of daily monitoring the patients' weight and blood pressure directly from their home; automatically and securely transmit the values to a server at the University Hospital of North Norway (UNN); and monitor the values by a trained nurse at the He