Home monitoring helps manage heart failure

LOS ANGELES, Jan. 4 (UPI) -- Heart failure needs to be closely tracked and home-monitoring interventions may be especially useful, U.S. researchers say.

Dr. Gregg C. Fonarow, director of the Ahmanson-University of California, Los Angeles Health Sciences' Cardiomyopathy Center, and co-chief of clinical cardiology at the David Geffen School of Medicine at UCLA, said heart failure affects 5.8 million people in the United States and is responsible for nearly 1 million hospitalizations each year.

The field of heart failure home-monitoring is fairly new, but it does provide for effective and cost-effective heart failure disease-management and early identification of body-fluid congestion.

There are a number of home-monitoring strategies incorporated including: Self-care, such as daily weighing and medication management; phone calls from a nurse or automated response system; home health visits; and telemedicine and remote monitoring with implantable and external devices to track vital information.

"Further study will help assess optimal approaches, such as identifying which patients may benefit the most from such monitoring, and will determine which health data -- blood pressure or shortness of breath, for example -- might be the best to monitor," Fonarow said in a statement.