St. Paul's Hospital
Heart Function Clinic
Heart Helper E-Service
Online health monitoring for heart failure patients
- ASP .NET
- SQL Server 2000
- Business Requirements
- Database Design
- Needs Assessment
- Programming
- User Experience Design
We are currently half way through this initial pilot study to assess feasibility. We are confident that this system will make a huge difference in patients' lives. Already our study participants love it! They feel confident to know that someone is there monitoring their progress and helping them to understand the subtleties of their illness.
Annemarie Kaan
Clinical Nurse Specialist, Heart Failure/Transplantation — St Pauls Hospital
/// Heart failure (CHF) is a progressive, chronic, terminal disease that has been documented to affect over 70,000 people in British Columbia, including more than 15 000 living within the VCHA. It is estimated that, in reality, double that number of individuals are affected and, with an aging of the population, HF will reach epidemic proportions in the years to come. Heart failure is also the most costly chronic disease, costing the province more than $96 million/year. In 1999, the Heart Function Clinic (HFC) was established at Providence Health Care with the objectives of reducing mortality and morbidity, reducing cost of patient care, improving patient quality of life, increasing patient education, and implementing a system to track the clinical outcomes in CHF patients.
OpenRoad was hired to build a web-based system that allows for heart failure patients to self-manage their disease by keeping track of their daily weight and answering several questions about their current heart failure symptoms. This system then reports data back to the clinical and nursing staff at the Heart Function Clinic, who review and triage the data, along with any alerts generated due to drastic increases in weight or negative answers to the condition questions.
Set to launch as a year-long research study with heart failure patients in June 2006, the application will test the hypothesis that HF patients will use a web-based system to self-manage their disease under the shared-care remote supervision of their primary and specialized care providers. It will provide prompt medical intervention early, when a patient's medical condition changes. By enabling patients to manage their disease from home, this system will improve their quality of life, reduce demands on nursing time, reduce the number of clinic visits and hospital admissions, and therefore reduce health care costs.