MILLIONS of pounds have been given to Southampton’s heart experts to launch the first major study in revolutionary technology that promises to change the way patients are treated.
The £3.8m project will look at remote monitoring kits that are used to track a patient’s heart when they are at home, via the Internet.
The country’s top cardiologists will study how successful the devices are at helping doctors to take action before a patient gets seriously ill and avoiding unnecessary stays in hospital.
The devices, which can be implanted under the skin of people suffering from heart failure, collect information on a patient’s health while at home and send it via the Internet to the hospital clinic.
Funded by the British Heart Foundation (BHF) and industry, this will be the first comprehensive assessment of the technology and will be led by cardiologist Professor John Morgan, one of the first specialists to introduce the hi-tech kit in the UK at Southampton General Hospital six years ago.
Run with the Royal Brompton Hospital, the study will involve 2,000 patients across nine centres in the UK and aims to clarify concerns raised by smaller studies, which suggest potential disadvantages, such the use of ineffective medication.
Prof Morgan said: “In the UK and within the NHS, we spend around £2 billion a year on treating heart failure, and about twothirds of that is spent on treating heart failure patients who end up in hospital, so the concept is that if we can stop a lot of those people from having to come to hospital by keeping them well for longer, then we can make people better and save money at the same time.”
More than £1.8m comes from the BHF, which will pay for the recruitment of nine staff to be trained in the use of the monitoring technology and appointed to participating centres.
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