[Telemonitoring in chronic heart failure patients. Which diagnostic finding prevents hospital readmission?]

Heart failure exhibits a significant clinical and health economic problem. The implementation of new therapeutic strategies favorably affecting the course of disease is still insufficient in day-to-day practice. Thus, the usage of telemedicine offers a central instrument for service and information, so that an optimized therapy can be achieved by consequent surveillance of the patient with chronic heart disease. Predefined vital parameters are automatically transmitted to the telemedicine center; if individually predefined limits are exceeded, therapeutic means are immediately initiated. For the patient, the center is attainable 24 h throughout the year in case he experiences cardio-pulmonary symptoms. This patient-oriented usage of technology should not replace the physician-patient relationship, but improves and supports the participation and self-management of patients. Furthermore, the results show that this technology can significantly reduce the amount of emergency physician services, hospital admissions and primary care physician visits, and displays for health economics purposes a clearly more cost-effective treatment strategy, while allowing for additional costs inherent to the system. The usage of telemonitoring in chronic heart failure patients may be a trendsetting form of care, which can be used to drastically optimize the information and data flow between patient, hospital and primary care physician individually and at any time.