New project to monitor patients at home in Terres de l'Ebre

The ICT Social Health Foundation and i2CAT have given the go-ahead to two pilot tests of patient monitoring at home in Terres de l’Ebre. The projects, which have been presented at the 4YFN congress, have an expected duration of 9 months and are commissioned by the Secretariat of Telecommunications and Digital Transformation, and the Sub-Directorate of Digital Infrastructures and Electronic Communications of the Generalitat of Catalonia.

The first project will incorporate a mobile communications equipment, including 5G technology, to the existing process of home care to improve the communications of the devices used by professionals in their clinical practice. This will allow information to be transmitted from the patient’s home to the existing information systems. To make this possible, the Primary Care teams of the Institut Català de la Salut have been provided with portable medical devices (ultrasound, ECG, digital stethoscope) that facilitate health care when they travel to the patient’s homes. On the other hand, by incorporating 5G, it’s easier to communicate and transmit information.

The second project aims to define a new telemedicine care process that allows to capture the information associated with medical and/or portable devices in the patients’ home environment and transmit all the variables, so that they can be consulted at the professionals’ Clinical Work Station. With this new process, the project participants expect to contribute to improving the management of pathologies, reduce the number of trips to the medical centre, empower patients in self-management because they will have access to their registered clinical data, optimise resources, and validate that the use of 5G technology guarantees the monitoring of patients in their home environment.

This second project will see participation from healthcare professionals from the Móra d’Ebre Hospital and the SAGESSA Foundation, who will contribute their knowledge to the design phase of the pilot. Before that, however, the clinical, healthcare and technological requirements will be identified, the variables to be monitored will be defined, the devices that allow monitoring will be selected, and the evaluation methodology for the pilot test will be designed.

Continuity of the 5G project in health

Both projects are based on the results and learning generated in the pilot test in the field of health and 5G carried out on a mobile ultrasound and a home monitoring system for chronic patients, presented last November at the 5G laboratory of the COEbreLAB, with the collaboration of the Ribera d’Ebre Regional Council. This region was selected for its highly rural condition, with a high number of municipalities with few inhabitants, and few health centres available. At the same time, as these centres are far from some of the municipalities, patients and professionals in this territory are forced to travel to receive medical attention. 

Apart from this project, i2CAT and the TIC Salut Social Foundation are starting to design a study in Terres de l’Ebre to bring hospital ultrasound closer to the patient’s home.