Home monitoring may help manage and reduce costs for heart failure
(Medical Xpress) -- Heart failure affects 5.8 million people in the U.S. alone and is responsible for nearly 1 million hospitalizations each year, most resulting from a build-up of body fluid in the lungs and other organs due to the heart's inability to pump effectively. The disease needs to be closely tracked in order to avoid such hospitalizations, and home-monitoring interventions may be especially useful, UCLA researchers say. In their new paper, the UCLA authors discuss the importance of heart failure disease-management and early identification, as well as the treatment of body-fluid congestion, using a number of home-monitoring strategies, including self-care, such as daily weighing and medication management; phone calls from a nurse or automated response system; home health visits; and telemedicine and remote monitoring with implantable and external devices to track vital information.