American Heart Month
The month of February is the 56th consecutive American Heart Month. According to the American Heart Association, cardiovascular disease (heart disease and stroke combined) kills about 2,300 people a day. 72% of Americans don’t consider themselves at risk for heart disease and 58% put no effort into improving their heart health.
The CDC highlights four ways to take control of one’s heart health:
- Reinforcing the need to not smoke
- Educating patients on how to manage conditions such as high blood pressure and high cholesterol
- Teaching patients how to make heart-healthy eating changes
- Encouraging patients to stay active
Reinforcing Heart-Healthy Behaviors
With Synzi’s HIPAA-compliant communication platform, home health clinicians can use virtual visits, secure messages, emails, and texts to reinforce the above heart-healthy behaviors with their patients. A home health agency can expand beyond providing transitional health care to delivering ongoing life care throughout the episode of care.
A platform such as Synzi plays a critical role in communicating heart-health messages by enabling agency administrators to schedule and send a cascade of texts and emails (as appropriate) while using in-person and virtual visits to reinforce condition understanding and behavior modifications.
Addressing the Needs of CHF Patients
The prevalence of heart failure is high and increasing. Outpatient disease management is critical for patients with heart disease as 83% of patients hospitalized at least once and 43% are hospitalized at least four times. Minimizing rehospitalizations for patients with CHF is critical to maximizing the quality of life for the patient while managing the costs of care.
- Video-based virtual visits allow agency clinicians to review the patient’s condition, address patient’s barriers and issues to lifestyle changes, and also reconcile medications with prescribers and pharmacists in real-time.
- A scheduled cadence of touchpoints helps reinforce the need for adherence (and/or dietary/exercise requirements) on a regular basis to CHF patients.
- Assessments and reports help agency administrators identify if a patient’s condition (and/or level of engagement) has changed and if an immediate intervention is needed.
By using Synzi to manage and motivate CHF patients, agencies can actively enhance patients’ quality of life and satisfaction with their care while reducing the frequency and severity of hospital stays.