We’re delighted that the Scottish Government’s National Action Plan for Technology Enabled Care, “Supporting & Empowering Scotland’s Citizens” includes evidence based exemplars of sustainable and scaleable use of Flo in Lanarkshire and Lothian.
The report highlights programmes of work led by Morag Hearty and Edinburgh University, focussing on hypertension and ‘MasterMind’ (computerised CBT), both of which show significant clinical results with Flo (see Scottish Network Event and new film launched).
“Home & Mobile Health Monitoring” Lanarkshire’s Rapid Improvement Study: Hypertension Monitoring in General Practice demonstrated that within 3 months 115 patients self monitored their Blood Pressure with result of saving 415 practice nurse / GPappointments. They concluded that for this population of patients in Lanarkshire.
- Home & mobile health monitoring (HMHM) of blood pressure improves efficiency
- HMHM of blood pressure for about two to three weeks avoids an average of four to five GP or Practice Nurse appointments. This saves clinic time for clinicians, reduces telephone contact time (using texts instead) and prevents patients having to travel to the surgery for routine monitoring.
- HMHM of blood pressure supports clinical decision-making
- GPs/Practice Nurses report that HMHM of blood pressure enables faster decision-making and provides optimum readings. This resolves issues around „white coat syndrome‟ (it did so for one third of this cohort) and allows a diagnosis of hypertension to be either confirmed or ruled out.
- People mostly find it easy to monitor their own blood pressure and report results by text
- People found the BP monitor and Flo text messaging system easy to use, felt it helped them monitor their BP, and would use it again in future, if they needed to.
A larger scale version of this, using the FLO telehealth system, is currently being rolled out across Lothian as part of the development of home and mobile health monitoring in Scotland, with full evaluation by the Edinburgh University (with funding from the Chief Scientist Office). As of 2016, there are over 100 GP practices engaged in HMHM initiatives and numbers continue to expand.
#Hypertension #CBT #cCBT #Scotland #TotallyUnique
