In France, between 400,000 and 700,000 people suffer from heart failure without knowing it. Health Insurance is launching, Tuesday, September 20, a major awareness campaign on this chronic condition which affects 1.5 million people, often after heart attacks. Telemedicine can help save lives. A study, published last June in the journal ESC Heart Failure (in English), was conducted for eight years in Normandy with heart failure showed that patients monitored at home by telemonitoring had half the risk of being hospitalized again and that their mortality rate was lower by one third to that of patients who did not use this service.
Remote monitoring is provided by hospitals in the region, in particular the Caen University Hospital. In a small office on the 9th floor, in the cardiology department, Véronique Rouxel monitors around fifty patients with heart failure on a daily basis. “Hello, it’s Veronique”, said the nurse on the phone to one of the patients followed. They all have a connected tablet, a scale and something to take their blood pressure at home to complete the questionnaire. “I wanted to give you an update on your state of health because a few things are missing.explains Véronique Rouxel to the patient. You don’t have any edema there yet? No, and your legs aren’t swollen?”
The specialized nurse watches for all the warning signs: shortness of breath, weight gain, edema and fatigue. If there is a problem, she notifies the patient’s doctor. “In terms of food, he usually doesn’t answer me, that’s why I dig a little bit by calling him from time to time, but on the other hand he answers questions about his weight well, explains the caregiver. We also asked him to take his blood pressure yesterday, there too his morale and his “state of fatigue. The patients neglect them a little but when a patient puts us that he is 8 out of 10 in a state of fatigue it is still that he is having a heart failure.”
Heart failure kills 70,000 people a year in France. There is no cure, but thanks to this six-month home follow-up, Professor Rémi Sabatier has found a way to stabilize the disease. “On discharge from hospital, there is a period when the patient is at risk of returning to the hospital for the same thingsays the professor. It is very frequent and around 30% over the first three months. To avoid this, you simply have to keep an eye on it and teach it to watch itself. Because obviously if we did that only by doing everything for him, we would only have a result for the time of remote monitoring.
“One of the particularities that we were able to show in our study is that patients who adhere well to remote monitoring, as we do here, then know how to modify their behavior in a sustainable way. There, we win because that once we stop the six months, many patients will continue to realize that if they have taken a little bit of edema it is not normal and they must go see their doctor quickly .”
Professor Remi Sabatierat franceinfo
Normandy is at the forefront of remote monitoring of heart failure patients, and yet, due to a lack of resources, only 10% of patients are monitored by hospitals in the region.