At Boston’s Partner’s HealthCare, the answer is yes. Venture Beat reports:
Boston’s Center for Connected Health, a division of Partners HealthCare, launched one of the first ‘connected health’ programs last month. It’s showing early signs of success, according to an article published this week in the Boston Globe.
Through the new system, patients can monitor their blood pressure, heart rate, and other key metrics from their homes and upload this data wirelessly; it’s automatically transmitted to an EMR.
This data is transmitted from a smartphone device or gadget to Partners’ database (which currently stores about 1.2 million patient vitals) and to a patient’s online medical record in minutes. Doctors can view this data at any time, and Partners’ patients can monitor their own health data through a patient portal dubbed Patient Gateway…
“This is a significant part of how we are working to change care delivery, putting the patient at the center of their care while maintaining a close watch on their condition when they are not in the hospital or doctor’s office,” said James Noga, the vice president and chief information officer of Partners HealthCare, in a statement.
There are some issues. For instance, patients may come in to see the doctor for small, clinically insignificant changes in blood pressure levels. Most importantly, however, the technology needs to work over long periods of time with little error. Once that is achieved, monitoring patient health will not be considered the technological cutting edge, it will be considered status quo medicine.