Coming up to week 1 with the PM, Communicator question

Some monitoring service or other

by Protimenow - 2020-07-04 18:59:30

I have a St. Jude's PM. It comes with a Merlin At Home device. The idea is the same - it will interrogate your PM, and some central service (probably run by the manufacturer) will receive the information from your device. 

Of course, the data goes to some agency in Communist China, where they review it and decide whether or not to play tricks on it. Actually, the manufacturers are very sensitive to the security of your data and have enabled quite a bit of security to your transmissions. 

If your device doesn't receive a summary, it's possible that you would be contacted. If the service detects problems - either with an arrhythmia, device performance, or other things, it'll notify the doctor that you have on record. 

St. Jude doesn't have an app that willl let you view your results. 

I don't know if Boston Scientific does, either. If you or I got the information, there's probably not much we can do with it, except to bug the doctor about insignificant results. It's probably better that we DON'T have access to this data -- if there's a problem, your doctor will probably be notified. 

It interrogates your PM nightly

by crustyg - 2020-07-04 19:06:29

Hi: Normally the Lattitude interrogates your PM each night - usually sometime between midnight and 3AM.  The battery life of your Accolade EL PM is calculated to include the RF transmission each night.  If you move a lot of time-zones, you can ask your EP team to change this time - it's fixed in your PM.

Under normal circumstances, the Latitude communicator will occasionally call into the receiving centre to show that it's there.  AFAIK, it doesn't upload any data unless there are alerts logged in your PM which have transferred over to the Latitude, in which case it sends up the alert and relevant data.

The EP centre that your Latitude connects into do the monitoring of incoming transmissions - the software highlights any problems, or if you've had a patient-initiated transmission authorised the team will be on the lookout for your data.

You will be aware that there's a big button in the middle of the Latitude that allows you to initiate an upload - but, again AFAIK, this is not normally enabled unless your EP team has agreed and authorised an upload, otherwise the Latitude will show an error light.

BostonSci are pretty relaxed about their manuals - it's not difficult to find the ref manual for your PM and the Latitude Communicator if you want to read more.

HTH.

Remote monitoring

by AgentX86 - 2020-07-04 20:11:46

The information goes to the device manufacturer who relays it on to your cardiologist/electrophysiologist if there is something wrong.  Depending on how your doctor has set things up it may report anywhere between every night to only when you push the burron (as it is in my case). 

I'm supposed to send a report or go to the device clinic every three months.  I generally go into the office (though with the WuFlu the office was closed) .  I have to be ther twice a year to get the clock set for DST anyway, so that's two.  Other than the last transmission, I've always wanted a tweak done so had to go into the office.

I also pressed the button, early on, when I was having arrhythmias.  They weren''t frequent and usually at night so it would have been difficult to track them down.  I pushed the button and the next morning they could tell it was only bigemini PVCs. 

Thanks

by andyinKY - 2020-07-05 14:28:47

For the replies, it is much appreciated!