This item is aimed at helping US consumers with criteria for judging an alarm monitoring service. It is written by Howard Feldman, President of Pioneer Emergency Response. He is a founding member of the Medical Alert Monitoring Association and has been in the alarm industry for over thirty five years. Medical Alert Monitoring Secrets.
2 thoughts on “Medical alert monitoring secrets”
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A layman might be confused into thinking that a medical alarm in the USA is an advanced form of telecare. What they actually have are poor social alarm services that are pretending to offer high quality medical emergency advice similar to that available through our NHS Direct. We should be congratulating ourselves on how far ahead of the rest of the world we are in the UK in rolling out telecare alarm services that include rapid and appropriate responses to environment, social and medical emergencies. We should be prepared to offer the Americans some lessons in identifying quality and measuring good performance in service delivery.
Hi Kevin,
Whilst i agree that their is a lot of confusion about the capability/definition of these alarms i somewhat doubt that healthcare in the US would benefit from provisioning a government funded NHS Direct style service.
Not only are the abilities of Health Information Advisors to diagnose serious medical conditions still largely unproven but the use of limited government resources to fund the support of the worried well would be a further act of disregard for the real problems that US healthcare system needs to tackle ie. poor and uninsured patients.