eHealth in adults with congenital heart disease: Current and future perspectives

In this thesis we explored the current applications and future perspectives of eHealth in the care of adult patients with congenital heart disease (ACHD). We described advantages and challenges of eHealth in ACHD patients and identified patients with a high risk for clinical deterioration, who might benefit most from using eHealth.
Our review of the current medical literature showed that still only limited data were available on the use of eHealth applications. Furthermore, we investigated the experiences of users of eHealth telemonitoring programs and to identified the challenges that have to be overcome to improve success rates of future eHealth programs.
We also describe a clinical registry in which we enrolled ACHD patients in an eHealth program. In this study, we demonstrated several clinical advantages of the eHealth program, as we established new diagnoses of arrhythmias and hypertension, and medication adjustments in between outpatient clinic visits.
Also, we identified two high-risk ACHD patient groups, adult patients with Tetralogy of Fallot(ToF) or pulmonary atresia with ventricular septal defect (PA/VSD) with the 22q11.2 deletion syndrome(22q11.2DS) and patients with type D personality, that might benefit from a more tailored approach, which eHealth might offer.
eHealth has an enormous potential to revolutionize health care for ACHD patients. Some of the discussed challenges in this thesis have yet to be overcome, however, none of them are insurmountable. This all lays ground for a promising future for eHealth in the care of ACHD patients.