Monitoring System Supervises Patient Medical Compliance

A novel patient monitoring system allows health care providers to track remotely patient health conditions and patient health-management activities.

The ALRT Health-e-Connect (HeC) System is composed of application software and hardware devices that allow health care providers to monitor the health status of patients in the intervals between patient visits to the doctor's office; monitor patient compliance to prescribed health management activities; stay in touch with patients via short message service (SMS) messages or via an internal messaging system; communicate and collaborate with other health care providers involved and the patient's family members; and document all patient interaction by the health care provider outside of clinic visits.

The HeC system is composed of the HeC Remote Care System, a web based application for health care; any HeC compatible medical monitoring device; and a mobile phone. After the health care provider enrolls patient into the HeC System and configures the system monitoring parameters, the patients prescribed health maintenance-program activities and monitored data are collected; at specific intervals, data is uploaded to the ALRT server, where the uploaded data is validated and compared to the programmed limits. When out-of-limits data is found, the system alerts the healthcare provider. The patient's primary healthcare provider, the patient, secondary healthcare provider and patient's family members may send messages to each other whenever necessary, and all parties involved may log on to the HeC system to view the data accumulated on the patient's health maintenance activities.

Current applications include diabetes monitoring, providing an affordable and easy to use communication network between the patient and the diabetes health care team. Data uploaded from patients' glucometers into the ALRT database is quickly assessed to verify user compliance and performance compared to provider set targets. The HeC system currently supports data transfer from glucometers manufactured by Abbott (Abbot Park, IL, USA), Bayer, Lifescan, and Roche. Future applications will include nebulizer use, blood pressure monitoring, pulse oximetery monitoring, electrocardiogram (ECG) monitoring, and peak flow metering. The ALRT HeC System is a product of ALR Technologies (Atlanta, GA, USA).

"The effectiveness of using ALRT HeC System compares favorably to the recently introduced diabetes medications but at a lower cost with no side effects,” said Hugh Tildesley, M.D., who conducted a trial studying the effect of the system on A1C levels in patients with type 2 diabetes treated with insulin; A1C dropped from 8.8% to 7.6% for the those using the HeC System. The study was published in the August 2010 issue of Diabetes Care.

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ALR Technologies
Abbott