SAFE@home: digital health platform for blood pressure monitoring in pregnancy
Worldwide 10% of all pregnancies are complicated by hypertensive disorders with consequences for both mother and baby. In pregnancies at risk for hypertensive complications, frequent hospital visits are planned to monitor maternal wellbeing. Together with Luscii, a home telemonitoring platform was developed for prenatal care (SAFE@HOME) with an app to:
- inform patients about hypertension in pregnancy
- perform daily measurements of symptom scoring
- home monitoring of blood pressure with bluetooth connection
Integrated in a remote monitoring dashboard, in-hospital obstetric care professionals can monitor maternal wellbeing from a distance.
As health care is facing issues regarding increasing costs and workloads, and insufficient hospital staff, digital health is a promising tool for future care. The combination of self-measurements with patient-reported (presence or absence of) hypertension symptoms has the potential to enhance efficacy and satisfaction of obstetric care. Studies have shown that digital health care can provide a reduction of prenatal visits without comprising outcomes of mother and child. Moreover, pregnant women seem to be an ideal population regarding digital health interventions as they are frequent users of internet, social media and smartphone apps.
Aim of the SAFE@HOME project is to redesign prenatal care in the Netherlands, enhance patient involvement, and to achieve a significant reduction of costs. However, more scientific efforts are needed to improve a system ready for use on a larger (national) scale and to investigate whether the home telemonitoring platform improves prenatal care through improved quality of life, health-related outcomes and reduction of costs. Investigating the implementation process itself enables the development of the best possible implementation strategy which can also be useful for other healthcare innovations.
