In Asia, chronic illnesses are on the rise, leading to a significantly more people requiring longer-term care outside the hospital. Asia will be home to half of the world’s elderly population and half of the global burden of chronic conditions by 2030*. By bringing care to patients’ homes, this initiative takes a fundamentally patient-centric and collaborative approach that aims to manage the situations that most commonly cause patients to be re-admitted to hospital.
The new, localised telehealth initiative tat bridges the gap between hospital and home to help address the needs of a growing number of chronic illness patients in Singapore. The pilot started on 17 November 2014, and has enrolled 120 heart failure patients to date. Preliminary results from the pilot programme are promising, with enrolled patients appreciative of its benefits. Patients are highly engaged and equipped to monitor their own vital signs – such as blood pressure, pulse rate and weight – all essential for heart failure patients to monitor on a daily basis for irregularities that could signal a need for clinical intervention, to prevent potentially rapid deterioration of their condition.
Results from 51 patients in the telehealth programme show an average 84% compliance** to vital signs monitoring. Lim Chia Boh, a 57-year-old patient who was part of the pilot study, had been enduring years of breathlessness while going through simple daily tasks like walking. Now, she is able to take care of herself in the comfort of her home and feels more confident about her overall health. She commented, “They [the telehealth tele-carers who stay in touch with her with regular phone calls] feel more like friends reminding and talking to me. It makes me feel comfortable.”
“We want to help our elderly age well at home and in their community, and reduce hospital admissions; telehealth technology can be a key enabler to help achieve this,” shared TK Udairam, Group CEO of Eastern Health Alliance. “We are encouraged by how well our patients are responding in this pilot study thus far; it indicates that we seem to be on the right track with regard to how telehealth solutions could be integrated and implemented to better manage chronic disease. We will continue to closely monitor how our patients are doing as the pilot study progresses.”
"Together with EH Alliance, Philips strives to establish a care model in Singapore that sets precedence for scalable, sustainable deployment of telehealth enabled care coordination for chronic patients," said Fernando Erazo, Senior Director, Head of Philips Healthcare Hospital to Home, Asia Pacific.
"The first telehealth programme in Singapore to support patients better manage their conditions, over the course of a full-year, is a result of 15 years of investment and telehealth implementation experience by Philips. This collaboration is a good example of how companies can partner to co-create solutions that will benefit our health system and patients."
Interested?
Read the TechTrade Asia blog post about the Philips' Frost & Sullivan award for this pilot
*The World Bank, Population Estimates and Projections, accessed 1 August 2014
**Compliance is measured as a percentage of the number of days the patients carried out self-monitoring over the total number of days of intervention.
posted from Bloggeroid
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