INR by Handheld Monitor
I had my first experience of this tonight and it worked well and took just a couple of minutes.
Some health professionals have said to me before that they don’t like the system, but as a patient it’s certainly less stressful than giving a blood sample. Or it certainly was for me.
My INR had hardly changed but the software used with the monitor, gave me a much more complicated schedule of Warfarin doses, than I used to get in Suffolk. Could it be that in Suffolk, the anti-coagulant team simplified the schedule, so that less patients got confused?
I won’t comment on all this from a medical point of view, but given a choice I would take the monitor route, as I got my result there and then and I suffered little or no discomfort.
But speaking as a trained control engineer and a competent software engineer, the software that works with the monitor, may be something that could be improved to make Warfarin regimes less complicated or prone to error.
The Anonymous Widower 
My dad has been taken off warfarin, as he has started to have falls. But I can see the advantage of INR being monitored at the doctors or by the district nurse, rather than a blood test. The whole thing was a palaver because my mother made it one, so a nurse popping in to do the test would have been much easier. But my father’s life, and certainly the lives of the nurses who had to put up with endless phone calls from my mother, are much easier now he takes an aspirin each morning!
Comment by liz | January 4, 2011 |
Can you tell us some more of the new monitor? was it done in doctor’s? did it use drop of blood like the diabetes kit? how much more complicated can the dose regime be? only three types of pills? do you need computer back up for analysis? ‘Appy New Year! Anne
Comment by Anne | January 5, 2011 |
It was done by the doctor and used a drop of blood. Analysis was on the computer and the same dosage could have been achieved by a simpler schedule of pills. The schedule would be OK for someone who is bright, but not for those who get easily confused. It just tried to get the dose too precise.
Comment by AnonW | January 5, 2011 |