The World Health Organisation defines telemedicine as health services provided remotely using ICT for the purpose of exchanging information for diagnoses, treatments, and prevention of diseases and injuries.
The irruption of 5G has allowed a great improvement in communications (latency, bandwidth, etc.). From a healthcare perspective, this technological evolution helps integrate devices and elements to implement telemedicine services.
Rural TDA 5G
The TIC Salut Social Foundation is collaborating with the i2CAT Foundation in the Rural TDA 5G project aimed at developing various initiatives and relevant use cases for the application of the 5G network in rural areas of Catalonia. The project started in 2021 and will carry on in the short and mid terms.
Based on results from the technological evaluation from a conceptual test, two use cases are being carried out: telemedicine on the primary care centre basis and home hospitalisation, for which a clinical evaluation for results will be ran.
In the first case, feasibility for carrying out primary care examinations at home will be assessed. In order to carry examinations out, a briefcase with medical devices and telecommunications equipment will be used to guarantee the transmission of data without the need for professionals to travel to the healthcare centre.
The second use case concerns home hospitalisation, which revolves around defining and validating a clinical scenario: patient hospitalisation at home with remote monitoring. To make this possible, there will be a set of medical devices for monitoring clinical variables and the patient’s condition, and communications equipment to guarantee data transmission. This case will be supported by PADES.
A series of sessions were carried out by TIC Salut Social to co-create with professionals from the Healthcare Region Terres de l’Ebre in order to ensure use case relevance and three were defined:
- Off-site care using videoconference
- Mobile ultrasound
- Clinical variables monitoring
The 5G connectivity quality simulating patient and healthcare professional environments were evaluated in all three use cases.
Implementation began in 2021 and was completed by 2023 with the report on results and conclusions.
LATITUD: Off-site care model
The Latitud project was launched in 2019 and established as the reference model for the implementation of digital solutions in the field of off-site healthcare in subsequent years, including the period of COVID-19. It finished in 2021.
It was guided to guarantee healthcare services’ fairness, quality, and sustainability, both from the citizens’ as well as the healthcare system’s point of view. In order to achieve said goals, the model centred around the person and the intensive use of data as pillars, and applied them through the configuration of dynamic care pathways. Health factors, as well as people’s constraints (social, economics, competences, surroundings, etc.), and available care resources, in order to define care routes adapted to needs and allowed to combine on and off-site healthcare were taken into account.
The model contemplates all health fields of intervention, including the healthcare value chain: health promotion, disease prevention, diagnosis, treatment, and monitoring.
Related documents:
In order to meet with the established objectives, a guide was produced with aspects to be taken into account in order to carry out digital off-site care initiatives, as well as recommendations for use and specific support materials for professionals.
- Recommendations for primary healthcare professionals
- Recommendations for primary healthcare management
- Recommendations for hospital, social and healthcare, mental health and addictions professionals
- Recommendations for hospital, social and healthcare, mental health and addictions management
In addition, several projects were carried out in specific areas:
- eExamination stands out since it is a project driven by the actual healthcare system and will be used in the majority of primary healthcare centres and extended to specialised ones too.
- Teleictus stands out due to the coordination capacity between SISCAT providing centres.
- Teledermatology stands out for the use of existing tools and the reduction in travel by the population.
- Monogràfic eConsulta
- Teleictus monograph
- Telederma monograph