A telecommunications system to manage patients with chronic disease

The care of patients with chronic disease is a large and growing problem in the United States and other industrialized countries.' it is expensive, and the quality of care received by patients is often sub-optimal, resulting in poor health outcomes. We developed a totally automated computer-controlled telecommunications system, called TLC, that provides--frequent, close monitoring of patients with chronic disease and reports the results to the patients' physicians on a timely basis, so that they can intervene appropriately. TLC also monitors the patients' important self care activities, such as medication-taking, and provides education and counseling to improve the patients' performance of these activities. The system operates through regularly scheduled telephone conversations with patients' in their homes. An evaluation of a TLC chronic disease application for patients with hypertension demonstrated that use of the system was associated with significant improvement of the patients' adherence to their medication regimens and significantly improved blood pressure control. These results show that it is possible to design an information science-based health care delivery system that performs functions usually performed only by health care professionals, and suggests that information science will become an important means of delivering health care services in the next millennium.