Background

In Region Västra Götaland (VGR), the development of remote patient monitoring is given high priority, aiming for improvements for patients and reduction of healthcare costs. In this report we defined remote patient monitoring as continuous follow-up of relevant health-related parameters of patients located outside healthcare facilities (e.g. at home). Measurements taken by analogue or digital devices, objective and/or subjective assessments, are delivered digitally to the patient and to a healthcare professional. The healthcare professional provides the patient with feedback on the reported data (feedback may be automatically generated if data are within a predefined range). The plan in VGR is to introduce remote monitoring in selected diagnosis groups – some of which already started using remote monitoring.

Aim

The aim of this report was to provide an overview of systematic reviews regarding remote monitoring(as add on or replacement of visits in current standard of care) compared to standard of care in 25 selected diagnosis groups.

Method

In order to clarify how remote monitoring is intended to be used in the 25 diagnosis groups, representatives from the respective clinical areas were interviewed. As the scope of this project covered many diagnosis groups, the search was limited to systematic reviews (SRs) of randomised (RCTs) or non-randomised clinical trials. The relevance of each identified SR for our PICO(Population, Intervention, Comparator and Outcomes) was assessed by at least two project members (one clinical representative and one from HTA-centrum). Relevant SRs were assessed by at least two project members using SNABBSTAR, a tool developed by The Swedish Agency for Health Technology Assessment and Assessment of Social Services (SBU) for assessment of risk of bias/systematic errors in SRs. The tool consists of six steps and assessment of an SR is stopped as soon as the criteria for a specific level are not met.

The steps are: 1. Definition of PICO and literature search; 2. Inclusion/exclusion according to PICO, listing of included studies; 3. Risk of bias assessments; 4. Evidence synthesis/meta-analyses; 5. Certainty of evidence consideration; 6. Documentation of excluded studies, conflicts of interest, and an a priori published SR protocol.

SNABBSTAR evaluates how useful an SR is by assessing the methodology used in the SR. In the current project, SRs reaching at least SNABBSTAR level 4 were considered to provide relevant data synthesis. As reaching SNABBSTAR level 5 or 6 is considered necessary for reliable conclusions, we cited key conclusions only from SRs reaching these levels. We did not extract any data from the included SRs.ResultsThe literature search resulted in 3,332 hits. Of these, 279 were read in full text to assess their relevance for the PICO. Seventy-five SRs were considered relevant and were included; these were assessed by SNABBSTAR.