Surrey Heartlands Clinical Commissioning Group (CCG) has announced plans to extend the use of remote monitoring technologies across its area with a new service, BP@Home.
Set to roll-out across the region shortly, the BP@Home service will help patients with hypertension manage their condition at home, and support some of the 142,700 people living with hypertension across the 1.1 million population Surrey CCG covers.
The CCG utilised technology from Inhealthcare in 2020 to roll-out its Oximetry@Home remote monitoring service for COVID-19 patients. Now, as part of the CCG’s wider strategy for remote monitoring tools, it plans to extend the technology to other services, aiming to help reduce emergency admissions and attendances at hospitals and GP surgeries.
The latest service provides patients with the ability to remotely record and share their blood pressure and heart rate readings twice a day, submitting the readings for clinical review through a choice of communication channels. The system helps to calculate averages and relevant scores, providing alerts to healthcare professionals when needed.
In a trial of the technology involving 69 patients across four GP practices, it found the digital monitoring service helped 53 per cent of users move from a high to normal threshold for blood pressure within three months, with 56 per cent achieving that through lifestyle changes around exercise or diet.
Dr Jagjit Rai, Partner, St David’s Family Practice, commented: “I have been involved with setting up the long-term condition remote monitoring service in North West Surrey, and I’m delighted with the results of our pilot. We have demonstrated that patients are happy to monitor their conditions from home, and when they do, they not only develop a better understanding of their condition, but feel empowered to manage it better through remembering to take their medication and making lifestyle choices.
“This will lead to better preventative care for our patients, and also reduce the burden on GP practices as we will receive the patient‘s results electronically rather than having to see them each time. This should result in better health for our patients, fewer patients needing emergency care, and it frees up valuable appointments for more acute patients. We are now moving ahead with rolling out the BP@Home service across a greater number of practices in Surrey Heartlands with support from NHSX.”
In August, HTN welcomed Katherine Church, Chief Digital Officer at Surrey Heartlands CCG, to share with us the organisation’s approach to digital primary care. Watch the session here:
