Commonwealth Fund Case Study Highlights Telehealth

Remote patient monitoring—better known as telehealth—can facilitate communication between patients and their caregivers and engage patients in managing their own care. A new set of case studies published by the Commonwealth Fund highlights three successful telehealth programs:

• The Veterans Health Administration's Care Coordination Home Telehealth program, which demonstrates the possibility of implementing telehealth on a broad scale and achieving cost-effective, high-quality outcomes for chronic care patients. 
• Partners HealthCare's Connected Cardiac Care Program for heart failure patients, which has generated an estimated $10 million in savings since 2006 for more than 1,200 enrollees. 
• Colorado-based Centura Health at Home, which has merged a clinical call center with telehealth to improve outcomes for older patients after hospital discharge. 

Each of the programs started as a pilot with the support of a small group of advocates who believed in the technology’s potential for offering improved care for a targeted population. Early lessons include promoting a culture of openness and preparedness; using a multidisciplinary team-based approach; establishing leadership support; minimizing barriers to patient enrollment, like cost; and including nonstandard measures, like patient experience and staff satisfaction, in program evaluations.  Other commentary and research on telehealth point out the natural alignment between telehealth and the patient-centered medical home - a concept some employers are already utilizing to help manage employee population health.