Gideon Marr felt entirely normal on the day the clinic rang him, which is the part of the story he still finds unsettling.
Nothing in the programme is technologically remarkable. The difference is that somebody is looking at the output on a schedule, and knows who they are looking at.
Cardiac rehabilitation is meant to be twelve weeks of supervised, graded exercise. For patients two hours from a centre, that has historically meant no rehabilitation at all.
Trends are visible to us before symptoms are visible to patients. That’s the only advantage remote monitoring really has.
Illustrative composite
The shared-care clinic puts a specialist on a scheduled video link into the local practice, with the practice nurse physically in the room and the monitoring data already on screen.
It was a chest infection, caught early and treated at home. “I’d have carried on,” he says. “I genuinely would have carried on.”
