Evaluation of Remote Patient Monitoring.

The study is designed to evaluate the impact of home-based monitoring to support community based nursing services and care matrons in the management of patients with CHF and COPD and co-morbidities. The main issue is to design a study that will determine the impact of the use of the technology independent of other factors. A randomised controlled trial has been chosen in which equal numbers of participants with and without home-based monitoring will be followed over the study to determine differences in utilisation of healthcare services including number of hospitalisations, length of stay in hospital, GP visits and community matron and specialist community nurse home visits. The ethical issue is how to determine those that will receive home-based monitoring and those that will be denied. The study requires that participants are matched for severity of their condition in each arm and this could deny some from the potential benefits of monitoring. However, as only a limited number of home-based monitors are available and all participants will continue to receive normal health care services, we believe that those denied monitoring will not receive care that is different to patients not in the study and the ethical issues are acceptable.