Kendall Ho
The federal government and the Michael Smith Foundation for Health Research are providing $850,000 for a Faculty of Medicine-led project to remotely monitor the health of seniors in their homes.
The four-year grant will connect community- and hospital-based doctors and nurses to patients — especially those with heart failure or have recently been treated in an emergency room — to ascertain, over a secure connection, how well patients are recovering.
The TEC4Home project, led by Kendall Ho, a Professor of Emergency Medicine, also involves the B.C. Ministry of Health, Vancouver Coastal Health, TELUS Health and Sentrian, a software company focused on health data analytics. By monitoring weight, blood pressure, blood oxygen level, and heart rate, it aims to catch problems early that, if ignored, might otherwise require a return trip to the hospital. Patients also will fill out an online “how do you feel” form.
“Using innovative health technologies to support heart failure patients will hopefully not only improve their health outcome, but also decrease patient and caregiver stress and reduce the burden of this disease to individuals and our society,” Dr. Ho says.
The Canadian Institutes of Health Research’s e-Health Innovation Partnership Program (eHIPP) in collaboration with the National Research Council of Canada Industrial Research Assistance Program (NRC-IRAP), is providing $750,000 over four years, with another $100,000 from the Michael Smith Foundation for Health Research.
eHIPP is designed to stimulate collaborations between health researchers, policy makers, clinicians and innovative technology companies. By bringing academia, health system, and industry together, eHIPP hopes that e-health innovations are being co-developed, tested with the people who will need them, evaluated for their cost-effectiveness, and entrenched into routine health care service delivery.