If you’re involved in home care, working to help look after elderly people and ensure they can stay in their own homes for longer, you might find the new My Inhealthcare app really beneficial for doing your job even more effectively than you do now.
It connects people directly to healthcare professionals such as yourself to help them manage their own health as best they can, with readings taken including blood pressure, blood glucose, weight, heart rate and more – all of which can be sent to you to help you monitor their health.
It can be used for a range of conditions, currently being used for the likes of diabetes, thrombosis, atrial fibrillation, would management, obesity, smoking cessation and tracking vital signs such as blood pressure, temperature and heart rate.
There’s also a medication reminder and scheduled appointment reminder service, so those in your care can keep all the important information they need in one place. It enables carers to review historic readings and results over time, submit meetings to their patient record, receive dosage instructions from their healthcare professional, keep a diary and more.
Care home manager at a specialist dementia facility Emma Smith was quoted by Care Home magazine as saying: “For our staff, the technology is very good, very quick and very easy to use. For our patients, the benefit is the potential to minimise admissions to hospital. A change in their environment can have a massive impact on their condition, so they need to be treated at their home.”
Read a few case studies on the Inhealthcare website to see how you and your patients could benefit in a similar way to others who are already using the app. Look at 84-year-old John Binks, for example, who was diagnosed with deep vein thrombosis at the age of 70 and was desperate to learn what all the medical jargon meant, as well as understanding the implications of taking warfarin.
Using the app, he can now self-test at home and relay the readings back to his clinic using a secure web-based portal. Now, he no longer has to make inconvenient trips to the clinic to provide these readings or receive his new dose of warfarin, receiving this at a time and place more convenient to him instead.
The result? John has boosted his self-confidence so significantly that his time in therapeutic range has continued to be stable. He also feels free from busy waiting rooms and his nurses report that they’re proud of his stable health and his independence.
“You get self-confidence and independence by self-testing. It’s very easy to do, you get trained, there are just a few actions you need to take to get a blood sample and like anything with routine it becomes second nature. It’s actually as easy as making a cup of tea,” John said.
He added that being more connected has provided him with a lifeline, allowing him to achieve productive and positive outcomes where his personal health is concerned.
