What Is a Holter Monitoring Service? What Are the Top 10 Things You Should Know?

What Is a Holter Monitoring Service? What Are the Top 10 Things You Should Know?

Holter monitors have been around for decades and have played vital roles in diagnosing arrhythmias that could prove to be life-threatening on some occasions. They are essentially portable ECGs that can provide a reliable overview of your heart health. 

What’s good is that Holter Monitoring Services have evolved to the point of being able to integrate innovative technology in their solutions. From boosting accuracy to easing up data management and other unprecedented perks, there’s a reason why more and more hospitals and clinics are choosing to use them. 

If you’re looking into working with them, here are the top 10 factors you need to know first.

Most services allow you to choose the duration of the monitoring.

In the past, 24 hours used to be the acceptable norm. However, since studies revealed that this can be unreliable, these services are now offering more extensive durations. As long as it’s advised by the doctor, they can offer monitoring that runs for 48 hours up to 7 days or even longer. 

This is a crucial point since there are many types of arrhythmias, and oftentimes, short-term Holter monitoring tends to have a drastically low detection rate (some even fall below the 50% mark). This is in stark contrast to 7-day or even 14-day monitoring periods, which can detect close to 99% of arrhythmias once it’s over.

Real-time monitoring and reporting is often the gold standard.

A lot of services delay the sending of data and opts to compile it as a comprehensive report once the entire duration of monitoring is over. This is not the case for Techindia’s solutions as we send the data being gathered in real-time and make near real-time reports that the attending physicians can easily access through any applicable device like a tablet or smartphone.

Obviously, this imparts a clear time-saving (and, in turn, life-saving) advantage that could not have been enjoyed otherwise. Usually, the Holter Reporting Services handle all of reporting, thus, lessening the burden on the doctors and caregivers.

Many services prioritize the customer’s and his or her attending physician’s convenience.

Besides making reports available, a vast majority of these services focus on delivering conveniences that aren’t found in the competition. For one, at Techindia, we do our best to make our Holter monitoring and reporting as customizable as possible to ensure compliance. You may freely choose what medium (whether through mail or email) to use when receiving the said reports, too. 

We also have a centralized platform for our monitoring purposes, which includes all the accessible, necessary data of the patient needed for optimal diagnosis and timely interventions. Others will make the entire process of the hook-up and removal of the Holter monitor as quick and painless to the customer. 

 Expect to remove plenty of steps, and thus save time and effort, once you partner with these services.

You’ll gain help interpreting the results, too.

After all, some Holter monitoring services don’t only handle the monitoring and reporting. Instead, they choose to go all the way and actually have their own team of certified handle the ECG interpretation. 

Most of the time, they are partnered with numerous physicians and hospitals as well, so you shouldn’t expect to have a shortage of help in that regard. For those who value second opinions, this is undeniably beneficial as well.

Remote Holter monitoring has undeniable advantages, but it’s not without its challenges. 

You’ll probably agree that going remote benefits both physician and patient alike to an extent never achieved before. Not only will the patient have peace of mind that timely intervention will be done should an event occur but it pretty much eliminates the need to do regular in-hospital or in-clinic sessions, which only saves costs for both parties.

However, it can also lead to challenges like mismanagement of data due to big influxes as well as the possibility of staff burning out. This underscores the need to design solutions that directly address these hurdles, which leads us to our next point below. 

Many services make good use of technology to provide value.

Besides offering extensive customizations to ease up the way you do reporting, plenty of the reports can also be encrypted and stored in any format that is amenable to the physician or clinic. At Techindia, we also overcome challenges during emergency cases when the health provider needs the reports ASAP. We can send the most up-to-date reports anywhere in the world within 30 minutes. 

They can be a cost-effective option for most organizations.

Considering the costs of buying and maintaining Holter monitors, clinics and hospitals may be able to save more if they choose to partner with these services. They don’t have to maintain and train their staff and digital infrastructure, too. Without a doubt, this on-demand model can be economical for hospitals that don’t frequently handle cardiac patients but still function as a viable option for it. 

Services complement their Holter monitoring with other solutions for more effective and comprehensive cardiac monitoring.

At Techindia, for example, our clients rarely settle for just Holter monitoring since it can be paired with our ambulatory arrhythmia monitoring service as well, which can continuously monitor and diagnose arrhythmia-related conditions. We also offer beat-by-beat cardiac event monitoring to detect silent arrhythmias and provide the most accurate and complete ECG report to clients. 

They place equal importance on quality assurance.

How can you completely trust an ECG report otherwise? Some services even come up with their own quality assurance program, with certified staff handling the checking of reports generated. Of course, that doesn’t include the reviews and final interpretations done by the service’s team of certified cardiac technicians. 

They can be truly life-saving, in more ways than one.

We’re not just referring to the obvious life-saving benefits of Holter monitoring when we say this. Rather, we’re also talking about instances when hospitals or clinics may be suffering from staff or equipment shortages required to perform proper cardiac monitoring. These services can fill that gap and, in turn, contribute directly to reducing cardiac mortalities worldwide. 

Conclusion

We hope that these facts have given you some invaluable insights regarding the nature of Remote Holter Monitoring services and the advantages you can get from them. At the heart of our services is innovation intent on lessening the load on physicians and improving the foundations of Holter monitoring laid out decades ago.