Riverside Medical Center recently became one of the first hospitals in Southeast Louisiana to use CareLink Express™ Service, a newly launched remote monitoring system that enables clinicians in healthcare facilities to quickly obtain data regarding the status of implanted Medtronic cardiac devices, facilitating faster treatment decisions. An industry-first, the system enables a device technical expert to remotely review device data and send the information to the hospital within minutes. “Incorporating CareLink Express into our facility will enable us to provide better service to our cardiac device patients by providing them faster access to care, while improving our patient flow and decreasing costs related to delays that occur while waiting for a device checks to be completed,” said Dr. Kyle Magee, CEO of Riverside Medical Center. “We are already seeing cost and time savings, and anticipate that this technology will continue to positively impact patients with implantable cardiac devices. The new service was recently evaluated in a 55-site pilot program over the past 6 months. In the pilot, healthcare facilities using CareLink Express were able to reduce patient wait times from an average of 84 minutes to less than 15 minutes. Prior to the FDA clearance of CareLink Express in August 2011, patients had to wait to have their devices checked in person by a device technical expert any time they were admitted to a hospital emergency department or operating room, regardless of the reason for their visit. With CareLink Express, the device technical expert can now check the device from a remote location and still provide the same assessment for the patient and device-following physician. In addition, a copy of the transmission data and assessment report can also be automatically sent to the patient’s following physician and exported to the facility’s Electronic Medical Record. Today, more than 3 million Americans have implantable cardiac devices, such as a pacemaker, implantable cardioverter defibrillator (ICD) or implantable cardiac monitors (ICMs). As healthcare facilities continue to face rising costs, CareLink Express provides a faster and cost-effective way to treat and manage this large population when it comes to implantable cardiac device checks. The Medtronic CareLink Network is the industry’s leading and longest-running remote monitoring system. CareLink provides health care providers and patients the convenience of telemedicine by remotely monitoring patients implanted with Medtronic cardiac devices and providing comprehensive data received from the devices to their physicians.
Posted on: Wed, 12 Nov 2014 20:31:20 +0000
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