Title: Scalable TeleHealth and Virtual Wards

Abstract:

The ability to transmit valid clinical information from a citizens home to a madical facility - is not novel - and ever since the arrival of wireless technology, more and more medical devices have been made available for home use. Despite the easy access to such medical devices - we have yet to see Virtual Care become a widely accepted and normal way of providing Healthcare to people. As people with Chronic diseases are a huge burden for any Healthcare system - One would think it obvious that Virtual Care would a got solutions to reduce the load on the hospitals. We are seeing more and more people with NCD’s caused by the increasing number of elderly people. In addition, we are also seeing a declining number of Nurses and Doctors who’re available for the Healthcare System. During the Pandemic, it became abundantly clear, that Virtual Care was NOT available and ALL scrambled to establish Videobased services as a stop-gap measure. It helps on the distancing issue, but it doesn’t scale well - so there is not much help to find in Video based Consultation. There are two major strategies that can be applied in Virtual care. 1. Remote Patient Monitoring 2. Virtual Wards Ad 1. Patients with a diagnosis or conditions that need to be tracked are provided with medical devices and daily they will submit data (measurements and Questionnaires) about their Health to the Healthcare provider. Ad 2. Patients are moved from a hospital bed to their own home and provided with Medical Devices that continuously monitor their Vital Signs and feed the data to the Healthcare Staff in a Virtual Ward, that monitors the live stream of data and takes action if the data show that the patient needs intervention. After the Pandemic, many healthCare organizations - especially NHS, are focusing on early discharge as a means to free up space in the Hospital - which gives an immediate result, whereas Remote Patient Monitoring is more of a preventive effort, and requires more time to show an effect. Both initiatives give excellent results as has been proven numerous times. This session will address the underlying challenges of scaling up such solutions. What is required technically, and also a bit about administrative requirements, and how is it organized from a project management point of view.

Biography:

Henrik L. Ibsen is CEO of the danish Virtual Care company OTH.IO From a Computer Science background - Henrik worked as a developer and Projectmanager before managing Healthcare IT projects for CSC starting in 1997. In 2002 Henrik was the lead Architect behind the vision and design to implement the National Health Portal (https://www.sundhed.dk) which was launched in 2003, and now covers all citizens and Healthcare Professionals in Denmark. In 2011 Henriks company also developed and delivered the Danish National Service Platform for healthcare IT - integrating and standardizing data exchange in Healthcare on the national level in Denmark. With a fully digitized Healthcare System, Henrik turned his attention to bringing Healthcare to the citizens, as to help the hospitals become more effective in supplying healthcare. The OTH.IO platform has been in full production across Denmark since 2013, and with 9 years of experience in Virtual Healthcare, Henrik is an authority on the requirements and challenges in scaling up Virtual Care.