NHS Scotland to develop remote monitoring pathways to help patients self-manage health needs
The NHS in Scotland has partnered with Inhealthcare, a remote patient monitoring services provider, to develop and expand a range of remote monitoring pathways across the nation to help patients safely self-manage their health needs at home.
The pathways, which include blood pressure monitoring and chronic pain management, are part of Connect Me, the remote monitoring programme for NHS Scotland. The NHS developed the pathways using Inhealthcare’s award-winning digital health platform.
To date, nearly 12,000 people have used earlier iterations of the pathways to support conditions including asthma, chronic obstructive pulmonary disease, depression, hypertension, irritable bowel syndrome, and undernutrition.
The blood pressure monitoring service is expected to be one of the largest pathways of its kind and so far has supported more than 5,700 patients.
A growing number of patients are being offered Connect Me to interact and communicate with their healthcare professionals. The programme enables people to have more choice and greater flexibility about how and where they manage their health and wellbeing.
The free programme is provided via mobile app, website, text message or automated phone call. It is being used to monitor the effects of starting or stopping treatments, issue reminders or encouragement, spot flare-ups so treatment can be delivered sooner, identify reasons why a condition might not be well controlled and offer advice and support during treatment plans.
Benefits for clinicians include better availability of data to assist early intervention, greater adherence to treatment, enhanced provision of care, net zero and productivity gains from less travel, more timely face-to-face contact with patients, more efficient use of resources and reduced hospital admissions.
Benefits for patients include less time spent attending and travelling to appointments and increased confidence to self-manage conditions and care.
Bryn Sage, Chief Executive of Inhealthcare, said: “We are proud to be working alongside the team at NHS Scotland to help Scotland become an international leader in technology-enabled care, supporting more people to live longer, healthier lives at home or in community settings.
“There are more than one million GP appointments per year in Scotland just for measuring blood pressure. By rolling out remote monitoring pathways for conditions such as hypertension, we are helping to create significant extra capacity within the healthcare system.”
Inhealthcare announced in early 2022 it was the successful bidder for the NHS Scotland contract to support the scaling up and mainstreaming of remote patient monitoring services across Scotland.
Big data and analytics, digital apps, and remote monitoring ranked among the most important areas for future healthcare innovation, according to NHS Scotland staff in recently published survey results.
