A Service of
eHealth International, Inc.

Background

Chronic diseases such as hypertension, diabetes, asthma, obesity, congestive heart failure, and chronic obstructive pulmonary disease affect billions of people worldwide.  Persons with chronic medical conditions often have difficulty driving or physically traveling to their healthcare provider’s office, especially in winter in northern climates.  This is particularly a problem for the elderly, who typically must rely on someone else to transport them.  Chronic patients also tend to be hesitant to "bother their doctor" if they have exacerbations of their condition.   Hesitancy in contacting the provider or missing needed appointments, causes the medical status of the patient to deteriorate, which results in mismanagement of their condition (Maggie's Story).  This mismanagement can waste healthcare dollars.   

Online patient care offers solutions for these inefficiencies in healthcare delivery.  The term patient "e-care" was coined to describe this new mode of interaction between patients and their health care providers.  Internet technology has opened up the possibility of patients receiving disease monitoring and management by their providers, in their own homes.  Patient e-care can bring back the house call experience, long missed by consumers.  Moreover, patient e-care could potentially allow health care to finally become proactive in preventing disease exacerbations, rather than predominantly reactive in dealing with them.

Patient eCare Services

eHealth International, Inc. is a company providing e-care services to consumers and healthcare providers (article at ehealthnurse.com).  Condition-specific web sites allow consumers to interact with their healthcare providers, as well as with other individuals afflicted with the same conditions (wetbusters.com and blubberbusters.com).  Patient e-monitoring systems allow home monitoring of physiologic parameters, such as blood pressure, blood glucose, respiratory peak flow, and weight measurement, via the Internet.  A patient can utilize an instrument at home, such as  a typical blood pressure home monitor, which is wired to a miniature computer system, that automatically sends the patient’s data via the Internet to a “secure” Internet server.  For example, in blood pressure monitoring, the patient simply  attaches the instrument’s arm cuff every 6-12 hours, clicks on a couple of buttons, and the readings are automatically sent via the Internet to a secure server database (from anywhere in the world).  The patient’s healthcare provider can then view the patient's data, via a standard web browser (again, from anywhere in the world), which is continually updated in real time by new data.  An Internet-based alarm system alerts the caregiver to abnormal physiological values.  The caregiver can delegate 24 hours a day, 7 days a week monitoring responsibility to a call center, which can notify the caregiver of abnormal values or other problems.  The patient's data, moreover, is taken in a baseline living or working state, so that erroneous data, such as "white-coat hypertension", are avoided.

Patient eCare allows many chronic conditions in medical practice to be more optimally monitored and managed, via the Internet.  Utilization of the Internet in healthcare delivery can: 

• reduce costs by reducing health care visits, while allowing closer monitoring and finer control of the disease.
• save time for patients and healthcare providers
• decrease liability, as all interactions are automatically documented
• link patients with similar disorders to each other, which can provide a more positive feeling about their health.

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