Expanding its portfolio of remote patient monitoring offerings, Royal Philips Electronics launched a new service that provides 24-hour, web-based remote monitoring follow-up services for patients with pacemakers. The new service, which was made available to cardiology practices in beta in August, is the first large-scale service of its kind in the USA.
Pacemakers are a critical part of treatment for patients with a wide range of heart conditions, and they must be checked frequently to ensure proper function. Philips has offered transtelephonic (data transmission via phone) follow-up services for 35 years. Leveraging this experience, Philips is expanding its portfolio to include the latest pacemaker technology. Remote monitoring is becoming the gold standard of care for surveillance of patients with cardiac implantable electronic devices. Scientific data has demonstrated remote monitoring allows earlier detection of patient issues than standard in-clinic follow up.
Philips brings unprecedented convenience and patient care quality to cardiology practices by conducting web-based remote monitoring of their pacemaker patients. Philips technicians review, summarise and triage each pacemaker test and provide clinically appropriate, customised notification to support timely and informed patient management for the physicians. Philips will be applying to its web-based service the same robust, proprietary follow-up processes that they have used for all remote monitoring services, which have increased patient compliance (i.e. patients completing regular checks of their pacemaker function) from 60% to greater than 90%.
“With the Philips web-based remote monitoring service, we can do more with less. We get more frequent clinical information without using staff resources, allowing our staff to re-focus their time on other billable services. And, the service has helped us improve our billing processes,” said Syed Samee, cardiologist, Blessing Physician Services, Quincy, USA. “Patients like it, too, because they do not have to make as many office visits.”
The team of Philips certified cardiographic technicians undergo intensive training and average more than 15 years of experience in pacemaker and implantable cardioverter defibrillator (ICD) follow-up. The technicians analyse and interpret more than 1,000 pacemaker transmissions per day, which enables them to spot even subtle abnormalities. This keen analysis resulted in a 0.009% percent error rate over the past 12 months. And with 24/7 surveillance, the cardiologists are alerted to critical patient data in real-time, without having to be on-call.
“Our goal at Philips Healthcare is to offer products and services that simplify healthcare and improve patient outcomes,” said Paul Bromberg, general manager, Philips Remote Patient Monitoring. “With the new service, Philips offers that and more. Web-based remote pacemaker monitoring helps cardiology practices to streamline workflow, improve patient compliance, and enhance practice economics.”
