Dr. Jennifer Doran:

On the remote monitoring, so far our main focuses have been diabetes and hypertension. We did a morbidity map which involved looking through Dr. Lineen-Curtis’s records and mapping out all the chronic conditions on Clare Island. We also did another map of the Internet connection. That limited the number of people we could include in our pilot study because, as Dr. McCabe said, we knew from our original pilot that if people do not have a good enough Internet connection, then they cannot take part. We are working on that. It has been very successful. We have picked up several new diagnoses of hypertension that we might not have picked up for several years. I do not know how much the Deputy knows about high blood pressure but it is insidious and really increases the chances of heart attack and stroke. The sooner it is picked up and treated the better. We help these people with their devices. Our trial brought them to our health hub where we have a big Cisco screen. Professor Derek O’Keeffe, who is a specialist in hypertension, and I would remotely speak to the patient and we can use the screen to show them all the data we had collected. We can show them where the red section shows they are out of range – so their blood pressure is high 30% of the time and that is why we need to make a certain change – and then bring them back a month later. This is people in their 80s who might need to spend two nights off the island just for a ten-minute appointment. Instead we are able to monitor them remotely. It is the same with diabetes. It has been really successful and we have received a lot of positive feedback from our patients about their experiences.