Imperial College Healthcare NHS Trust has collaborated with Northumbria Healthcare NHS Foundation Trust and Sheffield Teaching Hospitals NHS Foundation Trust, to take part in the Digitally Enhanced Rehabilitation in Cardiac Patients (DERIC) care platform trial.
Health tech company ConnectedLife created DERIC to help deliver cardiac rehabilitation to patients within their own homes, working with services and devices from Google Health and Fitbit.
Through the mobile app, ConnectedLife, patients can remotely enter health information such as weight, blood pressure, diet and other health information. They can view an analysis of their health, wellness and activity date and communicate with their care team. The dashboard on the app summarises the data patients share for hospitals to view when exchanging messages and facilitates conversations with the patient to form a care plan.
The cost effectiveness and benefits towards patients using DERIC will be analysed and compared with current cardiac rehabilitation programmes in a randomised trial conducted at Imperial College Healthcare, Northumbria Healthcare and Sheffield Teaching Hospitals.
Nicola Maxwell, head of Fitbit Health Solutions, Europe, Middle East & Africa said: “The combination of Fitbit and ConnectedLife provides users with an overview of their activity, heart data and other health related information allowing them to manage their own day-to-day wellbeing. This collaboration helps doctors, nurses and other health professionals to remotely monitor their patients. It could lead to better condition management and potentially reduce the burden on the healthcare system.”
The platform is being supported by NHS Digital Health Partnership Awards funding, with the British Heart Foundation Data Science Centre at Health Data Research UK advising on trial design, conduct and analysis.
Dr Susan Thomas, clinical director at Google Health London, said: “We are excited by the DERIC programme’s potential to widen participation, address health inequalities and improve the quality of remotely delivered cardiac rehabilitation programmes. If the evaluations suggest DERIC could benefit patients and health systems, there is the potential to extend the programme to other NHS sites and explore its use in other care pathways which might benefit from remote patient monitoring and communication.”
