A telehealth care team can offer a “slight comparative advantage” for older adults with end-stage Parkinson’s, including those in senior living communities, a new study shows.
The study, which evaluated the feasibility of improving palliative care for people living with Parkinson’s, tackled two separate concerns: training neurologists to better understand palliative care needs, and providing people with late-stage Parkinson’s with a telehealth care team.
“Persons with Parkinson’s have high palliative care needs that are underrecognized and undertreated in standard models of care,” the study authors write, adding that staffing shortages, or the lack of available palliative or Parkinson’s specialists in general, have created barriers to care.
Approximately one-fourth of all older adults with Parkinson’s live in assisted living communities or nursing homes, and cases in the United States continue to increase by approximately 90,000 each year, data show.
The dual concepts of training more clinicians to assist in palliative care, as well as expanding access via telehealth, showed a small but meaningful change to patients’ quality of life, the study authors said. The participants in the study who received telehealth care revealed slightly decreased signs of depression and, more importantly, showed more “advance directive completion” over six months, the study results indicated.
Despite hundreds of older adults and clinicians taking part in the study, the authors concluded that “more research” is needed to establish when an in-person care team needs to be supplemented with telehealth options.
The report did not discuss the Parkinson’s patients’ perceptions of the care offered, although 20 participants discontinued the care model before six months, and another 13 died.
A separate recent study concluded that, more broadly, any technology introduced into palliative care must maintain a humanistic or “warm” approach to be effective.
Although training more neurologists could help accomplish this goal, another emerging option to train nurses in palliative care is by using virtual reality platforms, as the McKnight’s Tech Daily noted earlier this week.
