NorthShore UHS Plans Telehealth Program to Monitor Discharged Patients

The NorthShore University HealthSystem is launching a telehealth program to track certain patients during and after the transition from hospital to home.

The Chicago-based health systems is partnering with Carnegie Mellon University and digital health company physIQ on the remote patient monitoring program, targeted at patients with heart failure and those undergoing ileostomy.

“This pilot study will allow us to learn from each other and from our patients about how technology can impact care delivery, patient experience and outcomes,” Lakshmi Halasyamani, MD, NorthShore’s chief quality and transformation officer, said in a press release. “This initiative is critical to our goal of developing scalable and sustainable solutions that are accessible across the communities we serve.”

The program, which will begin this fall, will equip selected patients with wearable mHealth sensors that will allow care providers to continuously monitor vital signs and other data. Officials expect to test the platform on several populations and use cases.

“Technology changes both what clinicians do and how they do it,” Rema Padman, PhD, Trustees Professor of Management Science and Healthcare Informatics at Carnegie Mellon University’s Heinz College, said in the press release. “Understanding the workflow challenges associated with technological innovation requires obtaining visibility into how a multi-disciplinary care team can design and deploy wearable sensors for optimizing the monitoring process and patient outcomes.”

The program is one of a growing number of telehealth projects using RPM to keep track of patients at home, either through mHealth wearables or telemedicine platforms that allow patients and caregivers to communicate and share data.

The platform has been used in the past to help providers improve outcomes in patients discharged after a hospital stay, particularly for those requiring rehabilitation or medication management, as well as for those with chronic conditions.

 It’s now proving popular with providers looking to identify, isolate and treat patients infected with the coronavirus – such as the University of Illinois Hospital and Health Sciences System, which launched an RPM project in June using the physIQ mHealth platform.