P1075control and Monitoring of Diagnostic and Treatment Process in Hemodialysis Clinic Using Telemedicine Tools

Abstract

Background and Aims Quality of life of hemodialysis patients and adequacy of hemodialysis therapy in general, is defined by the number and duration of incidents during hemodialysis procedures. In this study we examined the effect of telemedical system for control and monitoring of hemodialysis procedures on patients’ condition and their quality of life. Method The system described in this work included: doctor/patient video call functionality initiated from both ends; functionality of hemodialysis procedure parameters and patient’s condition parameters monitoring and registration; functionality of alerting medical staff about registered incidents, functionality of visual control of hemodialysis procedure. The effect of control and monitoring system usage was studied on population of 2300 hemodialysis patients (at the start of the study) with median follow-up of 2 years. The primary end-point was doctor’s reaction time on patient’s complaint, medical staff reaction time on intradialysis hypertension incidents. Secondary end-points were: number of patients who left the clinic due to reasons besides lethality, patients’ satisfaction by hemodialysis therapy (according to survey), number of incidents of intradialysis and interdialysis hypertension. Results During the study we observed that as a result of system deployment average doctor’s reaction time on patient’s complaint (defined as the time from emergence of the complaint to start of patient/doctor communication) reduced from 8 to 1.5 minutes, average staff reaction time on intradialysis hypertension incidents (defined as time from registration of hypertension incident to start of blood pressure normalization actions) reduced from 5 to 2 minutes. Number of patients who left the clinic due to reasons besides lethality reduced from 2.5 per 100 patients before system deployment to 1.7 per 100 patients at the end of the study. Average value of patient’s satisfaction by dialysis therapy increased from 7.2 to 9.1 points on 10-point scale (according to survey conducted at the beginning and at the end of the study). By the end of the study, average number (across population) of hypertension incidents per month reduced from 8.3 to 6.2 and from 20.7 to 16.5 episodes for intradialysis and interdialysis hypertension correspondingly. Conclusion The use of telemedical tools of hemodialysis procedures control and monitoring has positive impact on patients’ satisfaction level by the dialysis procedure and on duration/frequency of incidents registered by these tools, which, in return may improve the quality of patient’s life.