The Challenge
Studies have shown that remote monitoring of CHF and COPD provides benefits over standard care or home-based nursing support as it allows for pro-active implementation of interventions to prevent avoidable hospitalisations.
Whilst the available telehealth solutions have been proven to improve patient self management, home telehealth solutions are currently stand-alone and do not integrate into other health care providers’ systems. They also lack the ability to provide ongoing, mobile support to patients when away from home.
This limits the realisation of maximum clinical and economic effectiveness of the telehealth solutions.
The Concept
The telehealth solution will be integrated with other health sector applications utilising an integration layer to enable interoperability with a wide range of applications.
The Telehealth system will then be able to support the patient when they are away from home and/or in the community.
In particular, it could:
* Connect with a personal electronic health record delivered over the internet.
* Provide an opportunity for people to comply with their care plan if away from home, e.g. confirm medication taken or provide stop smoking advice.
* Allow authorised family and friends to access the electronic health record and become part of the care team to support the patient in achieving their health goals.
* Increase the channels for interaction with the patient e.g. if there is no response to the telehealth system a txt message could be sent.
* Increase options for contacting the patients support group e.g. a voice or txt message to a family member’s phone that there hasn’t been any response from the patient. In this way, friends and family members can be included in the patients care team thus empowering them to provide additional support to the clinical care team.
* Allow patients to access some of the features via a mobile device which could possibly appeal to those with lower levels of ICT skills.
* The record of the data captured by the telehealth system will be easily available to other healthcare providers. The patient can authorise access to the information when interacting with clinical health practitioners to provide more information about their current condition.
This will improve the effectiveness of the telehealth system, empower patients to better manage their healthcare, involve their friends and family in their wellbeing, and improve the quality of information available to clinicians. All this will lead to further improved health and productivity outcomes for the patient and by implication, the wider community.
