Author Interviews, Cost of Health Care, Heart Disease, NYU / 06.04.2016
Remote Monitoring Reduces Expenditures Associated with Implantable Cardioverter Defibrillators
MedicalResearch.com Interview with:
Joseph A. Ladapo, MD, PhD
Assistant Professor of Medicine and Population Health
Section on Value and Effectiveness
Department of Population Health
NYU Langone School of Medicine
New York NY 10016
MedicalResearch.com: What are the main findings?
Dr. Ladapo: While cardiac implantable electronic devices (CIEDs) are increasingly used to treat patients with arrhythmias, heart failure, and other risk factors for sudden cardiac death, these implantable devices require life-long follow-up to assess their performance and functionality. This need for continuous monitoring has galvanized the development of remote monitoring technologies for patients with CIEDs. Although randomized studies have shown that remote monitoring may reduce healthcare utilization and expenditures when compared to in-office monitoring, little is known about whether these findings generalize to day-to-day clinical practice. We aimed to address this uncertainty by evaluating healthcare utilization and expenditures in a cohort of patients with newly-implanted CIEDs who were followed remotely or with in-office monitoring.
MedicalResearch.com: What is the background for this study?
Dr. Ladapo: Remote monitoring is associated with a reduction in patients’ utilization of ambulatory and acute care and a reduction in expenditures associated with this utilization—at least over 24 months. This reduction was most pronounced among remotely monitored patients with implantable cardioverter defibrillators (ICDs). Although many of our comparisons between remote and office monitoring were not statistically significant, they trended toward favoring remote monitoring.
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