As populations get larger, people live longer and healthcare costs soar, hospitals and medical professionals are inevitably feeling the strain. Existing healthcare models are becoming outdated and hospitals are struggling to cope with the ongoing demands of providing high quality care to patients.
Finding solutions to tackle this ever-increasing concern is crucial to ensuring medical professionals are properly supported and patients’ conditions are managed in the most appropriate way without compromising their individual needs. One way this is being achieved is by providing more patient-centric disease management solutions with treatments that can be carried out at home. New SkyCare is the latest innovation in health that aims to establish the first pan-European virtual hospital, providing patients with safe and comfortable treatments at home via tele-monitoring and remote medical assistance.
The project includes the development of a Medical Service Centre, which will provide hospitals with a 24/7 care service that monitors and guides chronically ill patients who are suffering from type 2 diabetes and chronic heart failure. Due to be rolled out in The Netherlands and Sweden from early 2021, Development and Innovation Manager at Eurocross Nico van Dijk is helping to develop the Medical Service Centre as part of New SkyCare’s consortium. He said:
“In The Netherlands, 40% of healthcare expenses are spent on managing heart failure, COPD and diabetes patients.”
New SkyCare’s Medical Service Centre will help to alleviate the burden on physicians by consistently monitoring patients. It will provide regular updates so that physicians have a clear insight into each patient’s ongoing individual needs rather than the snapshot that is presented during a single examination.
“While primary care will still be with a patient’s physician in hospital, New SkyCare will allow patients to better understand their conditions so that they can manage themselves more effectively and proactively take control of their health.”
Data from the Medical Service Centre, which will have a team contacting patients and healthcare providers when necessary, will be monitored using existing e-health tools connected to an open central scalable platform. The benefits of New SkyCare include improving quality and accessibility to care, as well as reducing costs for hospitals and healthcare providers.
The goal of New SkyCare is to eventually create a scalable Medical Service Centre that can be implemented in other countries and used for other medical conditions.
Nico added: “ The coronavirus crisis has shown us all how precarious the situation is for our hospitals and healthcare systems. New SkyCare will help to ensure that patients aren’t compromised if regular services need to be scaled back or stopped in the future and will also help to facilitate the prioritising of patients and services as necessary.”
