Chicago Hospital Uses Telehealth to Manage DBS Treatment at Home

Rush University Medical Center has unveiled a telehealth platform that allows physicians to remotely manage patients undergoing deep brain stimulation (DBS) at home.

Through the NeuroSphere Virtual Clinic mHealth app, the physician can conduct a virtual visit with the patients and make adjustments, as needed, to the patient’s device. The platform enables providers to manage care as needed, tailoring treatment on demand and reducing the need for patients to come into the hospital, clinic or doctor’s office.

“This will be a great convenience for our DBS patients with movement disorders who have a long distance to travel or who have difficulty leaving the house because of their condition,” Leo Verhagen, MD, PhD, director of the Movement Disorder Interventional Program at the Chicago hospital and a professor of neurosciences at Rush Medical College, said in a press release. “Sometimes, patients need to be off their medication for a period of time before the DBS settings are adjusted, which adds another hurdle to making an office visit.”

DBS treatments involve targeted electrical pulses into the brain from a device implanted under the skin near the collarbone, and are most commonly used to help patients living with movement disorders such as Parkinson’s disease and essential tremor. Patients often have to visit a clinic several times to prepare for the treatment and receive the implant, and they often have to return several times for adjustments.

Rush University Medical Center is one of a handful of health systems using the telemedicine technology, which was developed by Abbott.

The technology pushes all the right buttons at a time when remote patient monitoring is becoming an increasingly popular tool in the healthcare sandbox. Aside from giving physicians a platform for care management at home, it also reduces in-person visits at a time when COVID-19 fears are stressing out healthcare providers and their patients. And it allows providers to modify care plans at any time, rather than when the patient comes in for an exam.

That’s also important for patients living with Parkinson’s and ET who rely on the treatment to improve their quality of life.

“Telemedicine is increasingly recognized as an efficient care model that is the way of the future, and remote programming ensures that our patients with DBS systems are not left behind,” Verhagen said in the press release.