Home monitoring remote control of pacemaker and implantable cardioverter defibrillator patients in clinical practice: impact on medical management and health-care resource utilization

Aims To evaluate the impact of Home Monitoring(TM)(HM) remote control on patient medical treatment and on health-care resource utilization. Methods and results One hundred and seventeen patients received HM pacemakers or defibrillators. A pacing expert nurse consulted daily the website and submitted critical cases to physician. During a mean follow-up of 227 +/- 128 days, 25 210 messages were received (23 545 daily messages and 1665 alert events) resulting in 90.7% of HM supervised days. Fifty-nine minutes/week for the nurse and 12 min/week for the physician were spent for HM data analysis during 267 web-connections. The mean connection time per patient was 115 +/- 60 s. The nurse submitted to the physician 133 critical cases in 56 patients. The diagnosis were atrial fibrillation (47%), ventricular tachyarrhythmias (9%), inappropriate implantable cardioverter defibrillator intervention (4%), unsustained ventricular tachycardia (7%), device suboptimal programming (23%), and impending heart failure (10%). Sixty-six unplanned follow-up in 43 patients led to drug therapy change (44%), device reprogramming (18%), diagnosis confirmation without further intervention (24%), no confirmation (6%), further diagnostic tests (9%). Conclusion HM technology allowed optimization of medical treatment and device programming with tow consumption of health-care resource.