10 key messages concerning remote monitoring
- For patients with cardiovascular implantable electronic devices (CIED), remote monitoring (RM) is the standard of care.
- Prompt patient enrollment and maintenance of regular connectivity with long-term adherence to RM accomplished by individualized patient and caregiver education is essential to an effective RM program.
- Adequate staffing using both clinical and nonclinical personnel with appropriate patient-to-staff ratios and dedicated time to perform defined roles and responsibilities are essential for managing RM clinic workflows.
- Clinical staff in the RM clinic should be appropriately educated and/ or certified and participate in ongoing quality assurance and improvement programs.
- Programming alerts specific to device type and indication with established mechanisms for promptly dealing with high-priority alerts can moderate increasing data volume and workload for RM programs.
- Communicating RM device results with patients, their health care providers, and the patient electronic medical record in a secure and confidential manner should be accomplished according to individual device clinic workflows.
- A relationship between RM clinics and device manufacturers for bidirectional exchange of ideas for staff training, patient education, patient care services, and management of safety advisories and recalls is imperative.
- Use of third-party resources may offer financial and practical benefits for dealing with increased device clinic volume.
- Implantable loop recorders require immediate connectivity to RM with special programming needs based on the patient’s clinical indication for the implantable loop recorder.
- Alert-based RM that relies on continuous connectivity allowing for extended time intervals between in-office device interrogations.