Telecare Europe and EuropAssistance are negotiating a partnership intended to offer innovative services to chronic patients. Considering that in Italy alone, there are over 20 million people suffering from at least one chronic disease, this partnership will define a new and more efficient standard of care for this group of patients.

The cooperation is based on projects that are already operational or ready to start, developed by Spain-based Telecare Europe. The first project identified a network of more of 7,000 pharmacies as an ideal distribution channel for delivering telemedicine services to home-patients. The second project aims to provide support to chronic patients' adherence to treatment, with the help of user-friendly tools and easy-to-use ICT applications. Finally, a package of technological services, tools and training, is under development and will soon be available through the pharmacy channel and through e-commerce.

EuropAssistance, leader of the insurance industry in 40 countries, will bring added value of great interest to these projects, making its structures and operational experience available. The telemedicine services will be integrated by special healthcare plans, that will make a high number of medical centers and hospitals accessible and that will take doctors, nurses, therapists and even the needed medicines to the patient's home.

Other key partners in these large distribution/low cost projects are DoctorShop, providing medical instruments; Unico, running a network of more than 7,000 pharmacies in Italy, and the German-based Trekstor, a supplier of tablets intended for clinical use.

Hear more about this at Med-e-Tel 2017 from Telecare Europe's Gianfranco Mochi in presentations on The Central Role of the Pharmacist: A Disease Management Project with a 7,000 Pharmacies' Network and TelecareBox - A New Approach to Chronic Disease Management.

UZ Leuven (Leuven University Hospital, Belgium) uses a patient self-testing kiosk in their oncology department to let physicians spend their time more productively.
Every day, between 180 and 220 patients visit the oncology department for a consultation. The classic measurements by physicians take 3:07 minutes on average. If patients measure their parameters themselves, physicians can theoretically spend 10 hours per day on other, more complex tasks.

The WellPoint kiosk, developed by BeWell Innovations, enables people to independently measure their own vital parameters at a point-of-care, and delivers the resulting health parameters to physicians. This frees up time for caregivers to perform more critical tasks. The kiosk can also be valuable in communities where medical facilities are less accessible.


You can test the kiosk at the upcoming Med-e-Tel conference or find out more at www.bewellinnovations.com.

Comarch Healthcare, part of the Comarch Group, provides a wide variety of healthcare solutions including IT systems for hospitals, software products for radiology and medical record management in medical institutions, cities, and regions. At Med-e-Tel 2017, Comarch will show how patient care can be made more efficient, based on the provision of telemedicine services and electronic health records. Its Remote Medical Center makes it possible to offer medical services remotely. The solution does not replace traditional healthcare, but is complementary to it, offering an extended range of services without the need for employing additional medical staff. The implementation of cost-effective telemedicine solutions improves work efficiency, which allows more patients to be handled at the same time. Through continuous health monitoring, as well as prophylactic and control tests at home, Remote Medical Center improves the efficiency of treatment and provides patients with a greater sense of safety by assuring permanent contact with qualified medical staff.

Hear about "Non-Invasive Monitoring in Early Detection of Silent Atrial Fibrillation" during the  Telecardiology Workshop on April 4th and about "Remote Medical Center: Delivery of Telemedicine-Based Services as an Extension to Regular Care" during a session and panel discussion on Teleconsultation and Virtual Care on April 6th, and meet with Comarch representatices in the Med-e-Tel expo area.

In a presentation during the Med-e-Tel 2017 Opening Session, SES Techcom Services will present some of its experiences with the SATMED eHealth platform.

SATMED is a high quality eHealth platform that is open, easy-to-use, readily available and accessible anywhere. It is the medical arm of emergency.lu, the disaster recovery communications platform created to improve the rapid response capabilities of rescue teams in areas hit by severe natural or human-made catastrophes. Building on this proven platform, SATMED has been tailored by the experience and expertise of non-governmental and governmental organisations, together with the innovative technologies of leading universities and IT companies in order to answer the needs of the global health community.

The presentation at Med-e-Tel will focus on the experiences with the deployment of the SATMED platform in Bangladesh, where SES is working with "Friendship" (a value-based organisation with a holistic approach to development) to provide healthcare to remote and inaccessible areas. Currently, approximately 80 medical specialists provide permanent health care for up to 200,000 patients per year. This permanent team is supported by visiting teams of doctors and nurses mainly from Europe.
Friendship activities are based on a four-tier system:

• Hospital ships - Friendship operates three ships, in which doctors form Bangladesh and visiting teams are active.
• Community-based health services.
• One teaching centre at the riverside area.
• A headquarter in the capital centre of Dhaka, including a dedicated IT office.

Friendship explores the capabilities of SATMED sharing medical records across the three different hospital ships and synchronising information at the headquarters in Dhaka. Furthermore, conferencing and consultancy tools of SATMED provide a simple way for interacting with the visiting staff even when they are in their homeland. 

Cardiovascular diseases are the most common cause of death and physical incapacity in many countries, with vascular obstructive stenosis affecting cerebrovascular, coronary and other arterial territories. High cardiovascular risk people, like smokers or those suffering from diabetes mellitus are victims of lower limbs arterial obstructive disease, which causes a long period in absence of both symptoms or clinical evidence.

Early stage diagnosis, obtained through non-invasive strategies have been proposed as a means of diagnosing incipient vascular occlusion and endothelial dysfunction in general. Since 2012, as a result of a public private partnership between a regional hospital in Zdar nad Sazavou (22 000 inhabitants, central Czech Republic, one of the highest incidence of diabetes mellitus, diabetic foot and related lower limb amputations), Vienna Point - Science, and a private company Advanced Medical Solutions (AMS), a preventive telemedical program was prepared, implemented and put into operation with positive results.

The partners in this initiative invite healthcare providers both rural and municipal for participation in the preventive program based on early stage non-invasive detection of endothelial dysfunction with a specific focus on high risk patients, mainly diabetes melitus II.

Main objectives are:

• analyze the applicability of a noninvasive diagnostic strategy for the early detection of arterial flow reduction in a rural population
• introduce a system of therapy adherence support
• introduce a long term sustainable preventive program
• introduce an integrative telemedicine platform allowing diagnostics, data storage, monitoring of patients in the natural environment and transmission for specialized second opinion

• promote technical qualification of remote professionals of health sector in the field of new technologies

You can still register in advance for Med-e-Tel 2017 and arrive "all set" at the event next week and simply pick up your badge when arriving. Register here and gain access to all conference sessions, expo/networking area, and two evening networking receptions. And meet with ISfTeH (International Society for Telemedicine & eHealth) representatives and members, and discuss how you can get involved in this expanding international network!

To follow are links to some interesting and recently published articles, books, studies, interviews and reports (if you would like to suggest an article for inclusion into a following newsletter, feel free to send details to [email protected]):

• Telemedicine saves time, travel costs, even air quality, new study finds (MobiHealthNews)
• The timely promise of telehealth - Carolina health care faculty put telehealth to work improving lives of rural patients (University of South Carolina)
• UPMC Health Plan telemedicine platform gives patients 24/7 access to care (MedCity News)
• Clinical effectiveness of telemedicine for chronic heart failure: a systematic review and meta-analysis (Journal of Investigative Medicine, BMJ)
• Telemedicine service for emergency heart problems provided on 5 Greek islands (Tornos News) 
• Telemedicine: Reimbursement in fee-for-service, quality models (Urology Times)
• mHealth Study Proves Remote Monitoring Beats In-Person Visits (mHealthIntelligence)
• 10 Guidelines to Launching a Successful Telemedicine Practice (mHealthIntelligence)
• UC Davis tracks 18 years of telemedicine and finds benefits beyond the bottom line (Healthcare IT News)