Study: No negative side effects to remote telehealth

The use of telehealth remote monitoring interventions was not shown to boost patients' mental and physical quality of life in a study published in the British Medical Journal, but there were no negative side effects to the treatment either.

Researchers from City University London's School of Health Sciences and other institutions collected self-reported physical and mental quality-of-life scores relating to mobility, self care, ability to perform usual duties, pain and discomfort, anxiety and depression from patients diagnosed with either chronic obstructive pulmonary disease, diabetes or heart failure. While the report did not uncover benefits related to telehealth's potential to reduce hospital admissions or slow the decline in quality of life due to chronic illness, the researchers noted that the study also did not uncover any negative findings. They wrote how, in addition to benefits, telehealth has potential for negative quality of life or psychological wellbeing stemming from “the increased burden of self-monitoring, concerns about intrusive surveillance, a perceived lack of user friendliness, or the undermining of the traditional (face-to-face) therapeutic relationship.” In contrast, researchers with the U.S. Veterans Affairs Department, Boston-based Partners Healthcare and Englewood, Colo.-based Centura Health recently reported that home telehealth monitoring can improve care and patient experiences, reduce hospitalizations and cut costs. The U.K. researchers noted that their study was not a test of treatment efficacy that would have required a “heavily resourced” randomized control trial. Also, since patients with different types and severity of chronic illness were recruited for the study, attempting to determine the clinical value of the telehealth intervention would be difficult because “Pooling patients with different profiles of long term conditions could mask differential treatment effect.”