Bringing care home: how telemonitoring can expand population health management beyond the hospital

With emerging technology, patients are able to access the health care system from settings such as their homes, long-term care facilities, and schools. Telemonitoring allows care teams to oversee patients' clinical data captured and transmitted by specialized devices, with minimal involvement or manual effort, on a near real-time basis. This review was undertaken to provide insight into the capacity of telemonitoring technology to improve population health. Despite the potential of telemonitoring, evidence for its clinical, economic, and patient-reported benefits is inconclusive. Much of the outcome variation seen in the literature may be due to the heterogeneity of the interventions' characteristics, with some telemonitoring programs more effectively integrating into standard practice, targeting patients, and utilizing technology. A particular challenge is the ability to comprehensively leverage data to improve health outcomes. To accomplish this, the mass data collected by the devices must be aggregated with data from other clinical systems and used to develop predictive algorithms that can be embedded across the continuum of care. Innovations such as the Healthe Intent cloud-based platform can support a population health strategy by integrating telemonitoring and electronic health record data.