Enhancing patient experience in long-term EEG monitoring

Patient experience is often overlooked in long-term EEG monitoring, but careful service design can improve patient compliance, clinical outcomes, and business results.

A key driver of clinical outcomes

Long-term video-EEG often delivers a poor patient experience, inadvertently contributing to non-compliance, early disconnections, and inconclusive studies.

Every touchpoint between a provider and their patient offers an opportunity to influence the patient experience. For patients experiencing seizure-like events, long-term video-EEG monitoring is one of the most common and decisive tests on the care pathway.

Unfortunately, a combination of unfamiliar sensations, restrictions on their routine, and uncomfortable equipment can make EEG an overall negative experience for patients. A consequence of this can be low levels of compliance, with some patients potentially choosing to disconnect early from the monitoring system.

This non-compliance can have a negative impact on clinical outcomes. With many epileptiform discharges lasting just fractions of a second, and seizures for seconds to minutes typically, patients need to be wearing the monitoring equipment for as much of the study as possible to ensure maximum diagnostic yield.

In severe cases, early disconnection can lead to uninterpretable or inconclusive studies, necessitating repeated monitoring and potentially delaying life-altering diagnosis and treatment. Good patient experience therefore becomes a crucial precursor to patient compliance, in turn supporting quality data capture to answer the clinical question.

Poor patient experience in long-term video-EEG can necessitate repeat testing, delaying diagnosis and ultimately disincentivizing patients from continuing treatment.

The levers of patient experience

Good patient experience in any field relies on practitioners having a strong understanding of touchpoints – when, where, and how patients interact with the organisation.

A patient’s individual experience is the sum of all interactions between them and the institution. Every touchpoint – from making an appointment to checking in, meeting the clinical staff, and wearing the monitoring equipment – presents an opportunity to affect their experience.

The very same advances in technology that enable long-term home monitoring also change the nature of these touchpoints from the traditional inpatient setting. When being monitored at home, there are less opportunities for face-to-face interactions with staff, with remote touchpoints taking their place.

These remote touchpoints can take a variety of forms, all serving the goal of supporting the patient through the study with minimum discomfort and service interruption:

  • Calls from support staff
  • SMS reminders for appointments
  • Automated notifications from companion apps
  • Take-home printed materials (brochures, pamphlets, patient handbooks, etc)
  • Online resources (organisation websites, help centres, instructional videos, etc)

These touchpoints are important, but delivering the best experience relies on looking beyond obvious instances of direct interaction between the patient and the organisation. From the patient’s perspective, one of the most significant aspects of long-term video-EEG monitoring is the monitoring equipment itself. How the system fits, the maintenance it requires, and its impact on their routines at home can all colour a patient’s opinion of the study, often affecting their level of compliance. As such, design decisions made during the development of the system can have significant consequences for a patient’s experience.

Choice of monitoring system has an enormous influence on the experience of patients undergoing long-term video-EEG, often playing a major role in patient compliance.

Engineering a good experience

When systems fall short, it’s often a result of prioritizing other features to the detriment of patient experience. For example, a larger amplifier battery enables longer monitoring periods, but adds weight for the patient. This conflict can be also seen in consumables: collodion delivers a strong hold that minimises electrodes detachment but regularly causes skin irritation at the connection site.

Clinics seeking to deliver a patient-centric monitoring solution need to consider how a given system contributes to patient experience. This contribution can broadly be measured against two metrics – patient comfort and the ability to deliver clinical outcomes.

Patient comfort
reflects a system’s ability to be worn without pain or interruption to the patient’s routine for extended periods of time.
Clinical outcomes
refers to the device’s ability to answer the clinical question and shorten the patient’s journey to accurate diagnosis.

Both metrics are essential to good patient experience. Comfortable systems that cannot reliably answer the clinical question damage the patient experience by necessitating repeat testing, extending time to diagnosis. Systems that deliver clinical outcomes at the expense of quality of life may dissuade patients from continuing with monitoring, delaying potential diagnosis and treatment.

These metrics are also interrelated – a comfortable system presents a patient with fewer reasons for early disconnection, supports clinical outcomes by enabling compliance, increasing data volumes, and making event capture more likely.

Just as there’s no one way to deliver patient-centric care, there are multiple ways for a system to deliver comfort and clinical outcomes. As such, clinicians need to understand where ambulatory monitoring systems fall short, using these insights to guide selection.

Patient comfort

Pain point
Possible cause
Skin irritation at electrode site Drying effect from collodion
Inability to sleep comfortably Poor system ergonomics – heavy equipment, bulky design, poor positioning
Inability to shower Sensitive electronics cannot be removed during study

Clinical outcomes

Pain point
Possible cause
Short maximum study length Insufficient battery life
Unacceptable data loss User error as a result of requiring patient maintenance during study
Excessive artifacting in data Noisy hardware design, poor quality signal chain

Patient experience is just as vital to consider when choosing a monitoring system as data security, ease of review, and other clinically important features.

A change that benefits provider and patient

Good patient experience is worth pursuing in its own right, but prioritizing it can be a catalyst for change across the organisation — enhancing clinical outcomes and supporting business objectives.

When patients are better educated about their condition and their treatment, clinical outcomes improve. A 2001 US study found that across 2,272 patients treated for acute myocardial infarction, those with the best health results after 12 months were those that reported the fewest problems accessing information, emotional support, and care plans. The same principles apply in neurodiagnostics. When patients are given every reason to continue with care, many will, reducing the risk of delayed diagnosis.

Similarly, investing in patient experience can financially benefit an organisation. In separate studies, institutions that scored highly on patient experience (as measured by quality of communication and perceptions of care) were more likely to be a patient’s preferred provider, more likely to retain staff, and earned more revenue per patient day.

Together, all of these things combine to make an organisation stronger – not only delivering better outcomes in the short term, but providing the capital needed to continue to grow.

Organisations that design services for patient experience are overall more profitable as businesses while creating healthier, happier, and more loyal patients.

A part of who we are

For us at Seer, it’s what we can achieve with and through good patient experience that drives us to keep innovating. We believe that the right approach to monitoring can make studies effortless and comfortable for patients, while still providing the accurate, reliable clinical outcomes.

We believe targeted improvements to technology can significantly transform the patient experience. Our home-based video-EEG system – Seer Home – combines advanced hardware and software with smart consumables, providing up to one week of comfortable, continuous video-EEG-ECG monitoring in the comfort of the patient’s home.

Seer Home saves providers time that can be put back into caring for their patients, all without compromising on patient comfort or the ability to answer the clinical question.

Learn more about Seer Home 

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