Examining Barriers to Digital Healthcare in PAH

Announcer:
This is Clinician’s Roundtable on ReachMD. Today, we’ll hear from Dr. Daniel Lachant, who’s an Associate Professor of Pulmonary Diseases and Critical Care at the University of Rochester Medical Center. He’ll be talking about the barriers to implementing digital health tools in pulmonary arterial hypertension care.

Here’s Dr. Lachant now.

Dr. Lachant:
As technology continues to evolve—and telemedicine is an a wonderful tool to help see and manage patients, especially if they don't live near a center—wearables are the way to give us, the providing team, the necessary information to know what their functional capacity is. It allows us to interrogate or ask patients if there's changes in clinical status hopefully before they end up in the hospital.

The biggest struggle we've seen so far is that patients don't all have the same type of devices. So, if a patient has a risk-based device, we're relying on photoplethysmography heart rate measurements, which are not as active with movement. It may not pick up arrhythmias as well. We like a chest strap, single-lead ECG, which we give to all the patients that participate in our research studies. That gives us the most comprehensive activity and physiology monitoring in one device.

The other issue we've seen is not everybody has devices, smartphones, or tablets to download apps on. So that limits who can use some of these. So we need a way to provide patients with platforms so that they can upload their data that makes it more universally acceptable and makes it scalable.

And, right now, also, proprietary algorithms from different companies limit how much data we can actually pull from the devices. And they may say, nope, we're not giving it to you; you only get whatever we put on our platform. And it makes it harder for patient care teams to get the information they want.

Announcer:
That was Dr. Daniel Lachant discussing the challenges of using digital health technology for pulmonary arterial hypertension. 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!