ACTIVITIES :: eTen :: Projects :: Projects of the Month :: HEALTH OPTIMUM
October 2005 Project of the Month: HEALTH OPTIMUM
Healthcare Delivery Optimisation through Telemedicine
Issues being addressed
A problem common to most European States is how to keep delivering
high-quality healthcare within an ever-shrinking budget to an increasingly
quality-aware and demanding population. Making cutbacks in individual
components of the healthcare system (e.g. pharmaceuticals or hospital care)
merely backfires by increasing costs in other sectors. Therefore, the only
way to cope with such a dramatic imbalance between demand and available
financial resources is to rethink the way healthcare systems are organised
with special attention to the reengineering opportunities that telemedicine
opens up. If this has not happened until now it is mostly because the
deployment of telemedicine has not been supported by a strategic vision.
Substantial amounts of money have been spent in recent years to implement
telemedicine services which have turned out to be little more than attempts
to computerise existing manual procedures and preserve the status quo.
HEALTH OPTIMUM takes the opposite approach: let’s consider telemedicine a
change enabler and let’s think big! The project is validating a new
telemedicine-enabled healthcare delivery model in three European regions:
Veneto (Italy), Aragon (Spain) and Funen (Denmark). These three regions are
all represented at Regional Government level, i.e. by those who manage the
healthcare budget and have authority and control on the organisation of
healthcare in their region.
On the technical side, the Regional Authorities are supported by
Telemedicina Rizzoli S.p.A. (Italy) and TB Solutions Technology Software S.L.
(Spain). PriceWaterhouseCoopers Advisory S.r.l. (Italy) and Health
Information Management SA, HIM SA (Belgium) are responsible for the HEALTH
OPTIMUM market evaluation, economic impact assessment, dissemination and
business case development.
The telemedicine services validated in the framework of the project are
shown in the figure below together with the clinical specialties in which
they have been validated:
Objectives of the project
HEALTH OPTIMUM aims to demonstrate that when telemedicine services are introduced in an existing healthcare context with a strategic vision and are seen by Regional Health Authorities as an enabler for an in-depth organisational and process reengineering, major benefits can be achieved for all the stakeholders (the Regional Health Authorities themselves, Local Health Authority and Trust Managers, health professionals and citizens). In order to check the economic viability of the service in a public health system ,the benefit will also be compared to the cost required to deploy and run the telemedicine infrastructure and services.. Results from the trials will also be extrapolated to the liberal medicine models to evaluate if and how the HEALTH OPTIMUM services can be deployed in countries which have adopted that model of medicine.
Achievements
Field trials are underway in the three participating regions and real-time clinical consultations and laboratory tests are conducted in each of them. The current situation (end of September 2005) in each of the regions is described below:
Veneto:
- the neurosurgical tele-counselling and the tele-laboratory services are operational in all the six Health Authorities and Hospital Trusts participating in the Project. Extension of the tele-counselling service to other specialties is being considered in parallel with the extension of the geographical coverage of the telemedicine network to the whole of the Region’s territory.
Aragon:
- the tele-counselling service is operational for oncology, haematology and nephrology and virtual referral for haematology between the Primary Care Centres of Castejón de Sos and Fraga, and the Barbastro Hospital. Seeing the success of the trials, the Regional Health Authorities have decided to adopt the HEALTH OPTIMUM healthcare delivery model and to include the extension of the services to other health areas, in addition to Barbastro, in the Health IT Strategic Plan for the next years.
Funen:
- the endocrinology (diabetes) and the tele-cardiology virtual referral are operational between the Svendborg Hospital and the Aeroeskoebing Hospital in the island of Aero. Extension of the virtual referral to GPs’ clinics is underway and tele-medicine within the hospital of Svendborg as a way of redistributing workload between physicians and nurses is being considered.
Reference Data
http://www.healthoptimum.info
Contract Type: Market Validation
Start Date: May 2004
End Date: January 2006
Duration: 21 months