Customized Cardiology: Adapting Treatment Plans with Insights from Personalized Event Monitoring

Posted on March 12, 2024

Since time immemorial, cardiology treatment hasn’t always been finetuned to address a patient’s individual needs. If anything, traditional heart disease treatment and management solutions were mostly generic, with the closest thing to personalization being the categorization of treatment plans based on the type of illness. But that alone is far from enough, and this is why personalized event monitoring is becoming very widespread across many clinical workflows today. Helping you customize and personalize cardiology, these technologies are fast becoming a staple of modern medicine.

The difference between traditional and personal event monitoring

Even monitors are basically small portable devices that the patient wears to track the electrical activity of the heart. Most notably, it takes an ECG recording during an event such as when the patient experiences a symptom.

Personal event monitoring works pretty much the same way but with a few subtle differences as follows:
1.More personalized biometric monitoring
2.Custom architecture for each patient
3.Personalized sensors depending on symptoms.

We’ll explore some of these features in greater detail in the next section as we dissect just how personalized event monitoring is customizing cardiology.

Personalized event monitoring – How it’s making treatment personalization possible

Tracking activity level data for custom lifestyle changes

Cardiovascular diseases vary in severity and nature, which naturally means that while one exercise option might help manage atrial fibrillation, for example, more efficiently, it may not necessarily yield the same results in another case, say when the patient has atrial flutter.

So this naturally calls for the need to personalize exercise and physical activity at large to match the unique needs of the patient’s condition. This is where personalized event monitoring becomes a huge lifesaver.

Equipped with a system of wearable sensors that may include weight scales, blood pressure cuffs, and activity trackers, among others, it becomes possible for a technician to identify safe and more effective exercise options at each stage of the patient’s condition.

By considering unique variables for the patient, this network of patient event monitoring technologies can help the doctor understand both psychological and physiologic responses to specific exercise and lifestyle interventions. This information can greatly help to personalize the management of heart illnesses.

Identifying the subtle signs of heart failure

Sometimes, heart failure can manifest very vigorously and visibly, with unmissable warning signs that sound all the alarm bells. However, it’s not always so. Sometimes, heart failure can creep in quietly without the patient or physician being any the wiser.

This is a particularly dire situation, with the HFSA reporting that heart failure contributes to up to 36% of all CVD fatalities. So it’s very important that physicians pick up the early warning signs before a heart disease gets to this stage.

With personalized event monitoring, it’s possible for a technician to monitor the heart’s condition as it deteriorates, helping to spot and correlate subtle signs of heart failure such as:
1.Lightheadedness
2.Swollen legs and ankles
3.Breathlessness at rest
4.Sporadic exhaustion and so on.

With the insights from personalized event monitoring, physicians can help to slow down, and, in very positive cases, even reserve the course of heart failure to enhance cardiac function.

Tracking intermittent events for patients

For some patients, the symptoms of heart problems can be very few and far between. In such cases, a personalized event monitor, which is essentially a wearable EKG, helps us to expand the diagnostic window to the tune of a few weeks.

Now, it becomes possible for physicians to drill down on these intermittent symptoms for the patient so that technicians can get the data that they need to personalize treatment. It can reveal information such as whether there’s enough oxygen going into the heart, what types of palpitations the patient may be facing, and other key data that help inform the selection or alternation of a treatment plan.

Gauging the effectiveness of medication

In the past, physicians would advise their patients to have a journal or diary where they would record their symptoms during a round of treatment. This helped the physician to understand if the medication was working and what sort of side effects the patient was exhibiting as a result.

Now, things have gotten a lot more efficient with the growing popularity of personalized event monitors. The technology is able to track and record EKGs during treatment, which can help caregivers gauge the efficacy of the treatment or management strategy.

If one treatment path proves to be ineffective or undesirable for one reason or the other, it becomes possible for physicians to make the switch to a new care plan early enough, which can have the following upsides:
1.Increased treatment responsiveness
2.Lower risk of complications
3.Better long-term health
4.Reduce risk of disease progression, etc.

Providing a source of constant feedback

With links to cloud technologies that help to provide real-time insights to physicians, personalized event monitoring technologies are lending a whole new meaning to awareness is power. They give you constant feedback about the patient’s cardiovascular system during a variety of situations, from treatment activities to physical activities and everything in between.

So even if the patient fails to check in with the doctor, you can still stay in touch with vital cardiovascular health indicators such as heart rate, blood pressure, oxygen levels, and so on. With this information, it becomes easy for a physician to make various adjustments to help reduce the effects of triggers that may be affecting the patient’s condition.

Keep hearts in the right beat – Cardiac Rhythm’s event monitoring services

Your heartbeat is the rhythm of life, and if we are to preserve it, it’s necessary to get personalized event monitoring. These services can help you to model and adjust treatment plans at a personal level and help you to realize more positive health outcomes. By leveraging the power of highly trained machine learning algorithms and human experts who manually review millions of heartbeats each day, our personalized event monitoring services are built to help you unlock value and success. To get started, simply fill up our contact form right now and we’ll get back to you as soon as we can.