Client Satisfaction with Telehealth in Assisted Living and Homecare.

Background: The Evangelical Lutheran Good Samaritan Society launched LivingWell@Home (LW@H) to provide telehealth services to clients in assisted living and home healthcare. LW@H assures client safety through remote monitoring of physiological parameters and assessment of nonbiometric parameters. Public policies increasingly support aging in place by allowing older adults with greater levels of impairment avoid or delay nursing home placement through alternative services offered in assisted living facilities and home healthcare agencies.

Client satisfaction with telehealth services in home health care agencies.

We assessed client satisfaction with the home telemonitoring service provided by 14 home health care agencies in five US states. Clients were randomised to two groups. Telehealth services (health monitoring and patient safety) were provided to 450 experimental subjects.

Testing telehealth using technology-enhanced nurse monitoring.

Technology-enhanced nurse monitoring is a telehealth solution that helps nurses with assessment, diagnosis, and triage of older adults living in community-based settings. This technology links biometric and nonbiometric sensors to a data management system that is monitored remotely by RNs and unlicensed support staff. Nurses faced a number of challenges related to data interpretation, including making clinical inferences from nonbiometric data, integrating data generated by three different telehealth applications into a clinically meaningful cognitive framework, and figuring out how best to use nursing judgment to make valid inferences from online reporting systems.

Family caregiver satisfaction with the nursing home after placement of a relative with dementia.

Objective: This article examines family caregiver satisfaction after nursing home placement of a relative with Alzheimer disease or a related dementia. Determining what contributes to family caregiver satisfaction is a critical step toward implementing effective quality improvement strategies.

Methods: A stress process model is used to study caregiver satisfaction among 285 family caregivers in relation to primary objective stressors (stage of dementia, length of stay, length of time in caregiving role, visitation frequency, involvement in nursing home, and involvement in hands-on care), subjective stressors (expectations for care), caregiver characteristics (education, marital status, familial relationship, workforce participation, distance from nursing home, and age), and organizational resources (rural/urban location, profit/nonprofit ownership, special care unit [SCU] designation, and custodial unit designation).

Burden among family caregivers of persons with Alzheimer's disease in nursing homes.

Purpose: This article examines family caregiver burden after placement of a relative with Alzheimer's disease or a related dementia in a nursing home.

Design And Methods: A systems-oriented contextual approach was used to study burden in 276 family caregivers.

Results: SAS PROC MIXED analysis showed burden to be associated with caregiver age, length of time involved in caregiving, custodial units, involvement in hands-on care, and expectations for care.