The U.S. Food and Drug Administration last week approved the first-ever wireless monitoring tool proven to greatly reduce heart failure hospitalizations and improve quality of life in heart failure patients. The CardioMEMS Heart Failure Management System features a miniaturized, wireless monitoring sensor that is implanted in the pulmonary artery to measure pulmonary artery pressure, a procedure conducted when HF patient situations become more critical. In past scenarios, the procedure was conducted to help monitor hospitalized patients. The new wireless option now allows doctors to monitors patients who at home.
"I believe this strategy has the potential over time to change heart failure," Lynne Warner Stevenson , director of the Heart Failure Program at Brigham and Women's Hospital in Boston, said, according to an announcement. "Not just to lighten the burdens every day or to decrease the number of hospitalizations, but to decrease the grim progression of the disease." Announcement