ROCHESTER, Minn. - The pandemic has shown us that technology could be the future when it comes to medical care.
Mayo Clinic's remote patient monitoring program allows care teams to monitor patients from a distance.
How it works is patients receive a tablet and other blue tooth devices to take their own vitals. Then, a team of nurses monitors those vitals and symptom assessments sent by the patients.
Dr. Tufia Haddad is the medical director for the Center for Connected Care's Remote Patient Monitoring team. She says the program combines technology and human touch.
"This will allow us to be less disruptive to patient's lives," Dr. Haddad said, "to let them recover at home in the comforts of home as opposed to bringing them in to our hospitals and clinics for observation or treatment."
The remote patient monitoring program has cared for more than 6,200 patients with COVID-19 since late March, including one of Mayo's own doctors and his daughter.
"It gave us this tremendous sense of comfort to know that there was someone who was watching our symptoms and vital signs and knowing when to escalate care," Dr. Deepi Goyal, an emergency medicine physician who was also diagnosed with COVID-19 and used RPM, said.
Dr. Goyal and his daughter have since recovered from COVID-19.
