Song Wang
Sichuan University, China
Biography
Telephone follow-up has been widely used to improve anticoagulant treatment compliance of patients with heart valve replacement in recent years, however, its effect remains unclear. The purpose of this study was to objectively evaluate the effect of telephone follow-up, in order to provide a theoretical reference for the extended care of discharged patients with heart valve replacement.
We searched the literature about randomized controlled trials(RCTs) and/or clinical controlled trials of evaluating the effect of telephone follow-up on anticoagulant treatment compliance in patients with heart valve replacement from PubMed, OVID, EBSCO, EMBASE, CINAHL, Cochrane Library, CNKI, and SinoMed. Two researchers independently extracted and assessed the relative data. Meta-analysis was performed using RevMan5.3 software.
A total of eleven articles were included. Our results showed that, compared with the control group, the intervention group had higher average scores in the aspects of medication adherence, regular review adherence, reasonable diet adherence, and self-monitoring adherence(P<0.05); and higher proportions of patients with good medication adherence, higher ratios of patients with regular review, higher percentages of patients with reasonable diet, and higher proportions of patients doing self-monitoring(P<0.05); and lower incidence of bleeding and embolism(P<0.05).
Telephone follow-up may significantly enhance anticoagulant treatment compliance in patients with heart valve replacement and reduce the incidence of complications such as bleeding and embolism. Furthermore, telephone follow-up is convenient, economical and can result in good effects rapidly, therefore, it is worth popularizing and applying. However, as the available relevant researches are limited, more rigorously designed RCTs with large samples are required.