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Maryam Jafarpour defended her Thesis titled “Designing and implementation of a heart failure telemonitoring system”
The prevalence of heart disease including chronic heart failure (CHF) in developing countries such as Iran is increasing and the burden of cardiovascular disease and its consequences are significant. Our Center is a center of excellence for cardiovascular medicine and heart failure programs in Tehran, Iran. In this center, more than 9000 heart failure patients are visited annually in outpatient clinic which a third of them are new cases. A study in acute heart failure in this center showed, 167 (58.2%) of 287 patients with acute heart failure were readmitted and 5 (1.7%) patients died during 3 months of follow up. Telemonitoring is a promising tool which can potentially alleviate some of the burden on the healthcare system by empowering CHF patients to care for themselves and enabling more efficient clinical care, such as through automated alerts at the earliest sign of deteriorating the patient. The aim of this study was to identify patients at-risk, enhancing self-care management of HF patients at home and reduce the disease exacerbations and readmissions.
Method: In this research according to standard heart failure guidelines and Semi-structured interviews with 10 heart failure Specialists, a draft heart failure rule set for alerts and patient instructions was developed. Eventually, the clinical champion of the project vetted the rule set. Also we designed a transactional system to enhance monitoring and follow up of CHF patients.
This system has implemented in Iran for the first time and we are currently in the testing phase with 10 patients to evaluate the technical performance of our system. The developed expert system generates alerts and instructions based on the patient’s data and the notify engine notifies responsible nurses and physicians and sometimes patients
This study is based on the design of a telemonitoring system for heart failure self-care that intents to overcome the gap that occurs when patients discharge from the hospital and tries to accurate requirement of readmission. A rule set for classifying and resulting automated alerts and patient instructions for heart failure telemonitoring was developed. It also facilitates daily communication among patients and heart failure clinicians so any deterioration in health could be identified immediately.
Supervisors: Dr . Safdari. Professor
Advisors: Dr. N. Naderi
Mehrshad Mokhtaran
Reviewers: Dr. N. Mohammadzadeh, Dr. M. Khabazian