Hospitals provide certain types of medical care to many patients that cannot be performed in a home environment. This is often the case with specific illnesses, surgeries, and other medical procedures that require a high level of monitoring of the patent. When medical conditions improve to the point that only occasional monitoring is required, patients can be released from the hospital or medical facility. For many patients, however, improvement can be a slow process that requires hospitalization for extended periods of time. These prolonged stays can become detrimental to the health of many patients. Unhealthy bacteria and viruses are often concentrated in a hospital environment, increasing many patients' risks of contracting associated illnesses and diseases in relation to the length of their stay. Also, prolonged stays in such an environment begin to affect the mental well-being of many patients. They often find it difficult to sleep, eat, and relax in such an environment. Similarly, monetary costs increase in relation to the length of the stay for patients, hospitals, and insurance providers.
As such, it is a benefit to all parties involved to discharge patients as soon as possible. In many cases, however, patients who would benefit from returning home are still in a condition that requires significant medical monitoring. Discharging patients in this condition may create health risks to the patients and liability for hospitals and insurance providers. One solution is to provide patients with remote medical monitoring devices. For example, a patient having a heart condition can be released from the hospital with a heart monitor. This allows the patient to be released to a more comfortable and/or familiar home environment while monitoring by the hospital continues. Through this device, the hospital can monitor the condition of the patient and take appropriate action when problems arise.
Current remote medical monitoring devices are limited in their usefulness, however, partially due to their generalist design. This “one size fits all” solution can be problematic, particularly for those patients that have medical conditions that do not quite match the design of the monitoring device. For such situations, medical care providers must often work around the limits of the device. Because of these limitations, medical care providers may keep patients longer in a hospital environment, or they may send them home with a limited device and risk further injury or even death, as well as increased liability.
It would thus be helpful to devise a means of providing patients with sufficient monitoring such that early releases from hospital environments are possible, while at the same time assisting medical care providers to provide patients with adequate monitoring to assure health safety.