Technology-enhanced practice for patients with chronic cardiac disease: home implementation and evaluation.

Objective: This 3-year field experiment engaged 60 nurses and 282 patients in the design and evaluation of an innovative home-care nursing model, referred to as technology-enhanced practice (TEP).

Methods: Nurses using TEP augmented the usual care with a web-based resource (HeartCareII) that provided patients with self-management information, self-monitoring tools, and messaging services.

Results: Patients exposed to TEP demonstrated better quality of life and self-management of chronic heart disease during the first 4 weeks, and were no more likely than patients in usual care to make unplanned visits to a clinician or hospital.

Creating technology-enhanced practice: A university-home care-corporate alliance.

Insuring full benefit of consumer health informatics innovations requires integrating the technology into nursing practice, yet many valuable innovations are developed in research projects and never reach full integration. To avoid this outcome, a team of researchers partnered with a home care agency's staff and patients and their corporate parent's Information Systems and Research group to create a Technology-Enhanced Practice (TEP) designed to enhance care of home bound patients and their family care givers. The technology core of TEP, the HeartCare2 web site, was built in a collaborative process and deployed within the existing patient portal of the clinical partner.

Psychometric testing of the self-care of heart failure index.

Background: Self-care is believed to improve outcomes in heart failure (HF) patients. However, research testing this assumption is hampered by difficulties in measuring self-care. The purpose of this study was to evaluate the psychometric properties of a revised instrument measuring self-care in persons with HF, the Self-Care of Heart Failure Index (SCHFI).