Trials and Tribulations: A Small Pilot Telehealth Home Care Program for Medicare Patients

This article describes a home care agency’s experience initiating the technology of a telehealth program for a selected view of its home care patients. The goal of the telehealth program was to improve patient outcomes by augmenting patients’ regularly scheduled in-home skilled nursing visits with video-conferencing encounters. Patient selection, costs, projected savings, patient satisfaction, and the technical, clinical, and patient problems with the telehealth system are discussed.