Residents of an assisted living facility on the Wartburg campus for seniors in Mount Vernon are participating in a pilot program testing remote monitoring of patients over a telehealth electronic system.
Twenty residents at Meadowview Assisted Living are part of the pilot program run by Vital Care Services, a telehealth technology company, and Pace University. A Wartburg spokesman said student technicians from Pace will visit Wartburg every Monday to assist seniors in taking their vital signs, which are then monitored remotely by a registered nurse at Pace.
Vital Care and Pace University last year were first-year winners of a $100,000 PILOT Health Tech NYC grant, an initiative launched by New York City and the New York City Economic Development Corp. The pilot project aims to curb health care costs by reducing hospital admissions and emergency room visits, increase access and quality of care for the elderly and train future working professionals at the university level.
Telehealth systems are used to communicate patient health data electronically to improve a patient”™s long-term health management and outcomes. At Wartburg, blood pressure readings, oxygen saturation readings and patients”™ weight are taken and sent electronically to a registered nurse at Pace.
“Telehealth systems will be increasingly important in the future because the number of practicing physicians will not be able to handle the increase in population of the elderly,” said Jean F. Coppola, associate professor at Pace”™s Seidenberg School of Computer Science and Information Systems and the pilot project”™s principal investigator. “So the elderly will rely on telehealth to live better and improve their quality of life.”
