At its annual House of Delegates meeting, the American Medical Association adopted a stance that insurance companies and Medicare should pay for care provided via telephone, e-mail, web portals and remote patient monitoring. Dr. Joe Kvedar, leader of Partners Healthcare affiliate "Center for Connected Health," tells us the move should be encouraging to home care providers with home telehealth programs. Marketing reps can now tell physicians and hospitals, "Look, the AMA likes it."

In the context of limited health funding, and a rapidly expanding population of older patients with chronic heart failure (CHF) it is increasingly difficult for healthcare systems to provide high-quality care to patients with CHF. Structured telephone support and telemonitoring can provide specialized heart failure care to a large number of patients with limited access to healthcare services. A formal review of 30 studies led researchers to the conclusion that CHF interventions utilizing information technology can reduce the rates of death and hospitalization and improve quality of life. The majority of elderly patients learned to use the technology easily and were satisfied with receiving healthcare in this way.

Remote patient monitoring, through the use of home telehealth systems, motion detectors and personal emergency response systems, is rapidly becoming more of a consumer market item and less of a medical device. A snapshot of news items appearing just within the past two weeks should strike fear into the hearts and wallets of home care providers who have put off investing in these technologies. Here is the rundown of recent mass media treatment of home telehealth systems, none of which mention home health care agency services.

Eighteen months after announcing a joint venture to develop and promote remote patient monitoring systems, GE and Intel have decided to spin off a separate company to continue the work. The as-yet unnamed company will be headquartered in Sacramento and will focus on supporting independent living with telehealth systems for persons with chronic disease and age-related conditions.

Combining high-tech monitoring systems with human interactions yielded psychological as well as physical benefits to cancer patients prone to experiencing pain and depression, according to a new study reported in the July 14 issue of the Journal of the American Medical Association.