Secondary Care

Leicestershire goes live with a new, community Digital Heart Failure service

The Leicestershire Partnership NHS Trust has gone live with a new, community Digital Heart Failure service to support patients diagnosed with heart failure.

The service, which is based on the CliniTouch Vie digital remote monitoring platform from Spirit Digital, aims to stop people going into hospital and improve clinical outcomes through remote monitoring and empowerment services.  It helps clinicians quickly identify when a person exhibits health deterioration and helps patients to know what to do next to help maintain their long-term health and wellbeing.

Using CliniTouch Vie, up to 50 patients on the Digital Heart Failure service will take daily biometric readings which are provided directly to a clinician web-based management portal. Specialist clinical staff will remotely connect with patients, also daily, to provide health and wellbeing advice in line with the local care pathway, while dynamic care plans and evidence-based algorithms enable automatic triage for the healthcare team.

Dr Sudip Ghosh, Research Clinical Director, Leicestershire Partnership Trust, comments: “Maximising clinical resource is increasingly critical to both the healthcare economy and patient outcomes. We were particularly interested in digital health to achieve this because when you look at the literature, the research based around digital health solutions for chronic disease indicates that telehealth and telemonitoring are one of the solutions shown to be effective, especially in heart disease and heart failure.”

“We are delighted to have partnered with Spirit to provide this service. They were able to work with us to improve the quality of digital solutions we were providing, not only in terms of the breadth of patients we can support, but also the system itself, which is a very enhanced user-friendly system that both patients and clinicians have welcomed.”

Emma-Jane Roberts, Managing Director, Spirit Digital, division of Spirit Digital, comments: “We are proud to be working with the Leicestershire Partnership Trust to offer this new Digital Heart Failure service. Our vision is for digital technology to be part of clinical pathways to facilitate earlier discharge, prevent readmissions, reduce risk of future exacerbations and improve self-management, whilst maximising clinical capacity.”