Bringing PAH Care Home with Wearables and Telemedicine

Announcer:
Welcome to Clinician’s Roundtable on ReachMD. Today, we’ll hear from Dr. Daniel Lachant, who will be sharing his thoughts on the role of wearable monitoring and telemedicine in pulmonary arterial hypertension care. Dr. Lachant is an Associate Professor of Pulmonary Diseases and Critical Care at the University of Rochester Medical Center.

Let’s hear from him now.

Dr. Lachant:
I think incorporating wearable monitoring and telemedicine is a perfect solution to help provide care to patients who live in states without a Pulmonary Hypertension Association-accredited center or if patients do follow at a center, but they live hours away and traveling is difficult.

When we do telemedicine, we're losing that physical exam. In some patients, we're losing our ability to see what their functional capacity is. So to have a home test—if it's six-minute walk test, I can put a sensor on a patient, have them do an unsupervised or supervised home six-minute walk test, get a distance, see how their heart rate changes, and put those metrics together—it gives me a better idea of their clinical stability. Are they getting better? Are they getting worse? And it just allows for more frequent assessments. Instead of waiting every three to six months to see how somebody's doing, you could do it much more frequently: every one month, every six weeks, depending on how that person's doing and what their clinical status is. And it hopefully will lead to improved patient care.

We can look at metrics like resting heart rate. If resting heart rate starts to deviate up, does that tell us that the right ventricular function's changing? Are blood counts dropping? Is extra fluid accumulating? And, on the flip side, if we see improvement in those metrics, same thing: are drugs helping the right ventricle to recover? Is anemia resolving? Is fluid optimization better? So I see wearables monitoring integrating perfectly with telemedicine to improve patient care and allow more of an assessment of what's going on.

Announcer:
That was Dr. Daniel Lachant talking about the intersection of wearable technology and telemedicine in pulmonary arterial hypertension management. To access this and other episodes in our series, visit Clinician’s Roundtable on ReachMD.com, where you can Be Part of the Knowledge. Thanks for listening!