Support for Heart Failure Patients FAQ

Support for Heart Failure Patients FAQ

What is HeartCare at Home?

HeartCare at Home is a care plan for people living with heart failure. It may help you to stay out of hospital and improve your quality of life.

Managing heart failure is all about regular monitoring and prompt treatment, which can be tricky with lengthy GP and hospital waiting times.

With HeartCare at Home, we’ve eliminated lengthy waiting times – our medical team monitor your heart rate, blood pressure and weight, via our easy-to-use app. If your treatment plan needs adjusting, we’ll get this fixed fast, so that you don’t end up in hospital.

The term heart failure* is used to describe a heart which is not working as well as it should. This can sound quite frightening but it is important to understand that your heart is not about to stop.

It can certainly cause a build-up of fluid in the lungs (lung congestion) causing breathlessness or leg swelling but these symptoms can improve with suitable treatment allowing you to live well with heart failure.

*Reference: The Irish Heart Foundation (irishheart.ie)

It’s nothing complicated! It just means that our medical team can monitor your progress without you having to visit the doctor or hospital. It’s easy – you enter your data into our app, and we check it to make sure you’re staying healthy.

The only things you’ll need are a blood pressure monitor, weighing scales, and a smartphone or tablet to record your measurements. Don’t worry – our team will make sure you have everything you need. And you don’t have to be tech savvy – we’ll show you just how easy it is to use our app.

It’s easy – one of our care team members will visit you and show you how to take your measurements and enter them into our simple app. They’ll be able to answer any questions you have.

You’ll need to enter your measurements twice a week, and complete a symptom checker once a week. If these are staying stable, we won’t bother you.

If we start to see small changes, we’ll contact you within 24 hours to ensure that you stay on track, well before any serious problems arise. You may be asked to input your measurements more often for a few days to monitor you more closely. It’s nothing to worry about, it just helps us to ensure that you stay healthy and out of hospital.

Keeping your doctor in the loop is an important part of our care plan. We know how important it is to monitor your overall health, so if any changes are required to your medication or treatment, we’ll discuss this directly with your GP to make amendments.

Our existing patients tell us all the time that they really value the support and sense of security that they get from knowing that someone’s watching over them. Research around the world has shown that programmes like this help patients stay out of hospital, so improving their quality of life.

Yes, of course! There’s no obligation here. We are here to support you and help you live your life. Whenever you’re ready to restart, just contact us and we’ll start monitoring you again.

This service is part of a research driven care programme to show that remote monitoring can improve quality of life for heart failure patients, specifically by reducing the number of GP and hospital visits. The study is being privately funded by Centric Health and Roche Diagnostics.

Similar programmes in other countries have already had great results. Once this study is complete, we hope to make remote monitoring widely available across the country.

All patient data is treated with the utmost confidentiality. All research data is pseudonymised before analysis in order to protect your identity. Centric Health is the data controller of all data collected during this programme. If you have any questions regarding this study, you can contact our Data Protection Officer at dpo@centrichealth.ie

Useful Links
Irish Heart Foundation: irishheart.ie
Croi Heart and Stroke Charity: croi.ie

Registrations for this life changing
programme are now closed!