Telecare Aware

Easy; inexpensive; effective: all the ingredients of an irresistible offer. Alertacall has put together a package for UK councils who want to try their ‘Safety Confirmation Service’ and who want to do so with minimum outlay, minimum fuss and maximum impact. They are offering to set up and support 50 people on the system for one-year, for a one-off cost of £6,095, after which clients who wish to continue will be expected to take over the monitoring cost.

[I spoke to James Batchelor, MD of Alertacall to find out why he had put this offer together. He said that talking to people in councils that had already bought into their service, he realised that it was sometimes difficult to make a large scale commitment until they had positive feedback from users, so he had devised this way of making the first step easy. He was non-committal about how long he would keep the offer going.]

Express an interest here.

Highly-respected in the field of telehealth/telecare investment planning, Tom Jones, BA FCCA CPFA DMS, of TanJent Consultancy is holding a free teleseminar hosted by HIMSS EMEA, on Tuesday 11 March, 15:00 – 16:00 CET (Brussels Time). He will cover topics such as:

• reconciling individual needs with the available finances
• how to optimise your resources to meet the increasing demand
• how EU member states have moved the new investment from planning stages to implementation

My recommendation is to jump on this opportunity. Register now via this link.

If you haven’t time to read them all, don’t miss the third!

£80 million to keep older people together in a home of their own

DH press release on a new £80 million grant to build extra care housing that would allow older people and those with long-term conditions to live in a home of their own. (Unlike the PTG, this is grant councils have to bid for.)

State of Adult Social Care Workforce Report: 2.5m staff needed by 2025

Analysis of the large and looming shortfall in available staff in relation to expected demand. Story from Community Care magazine.

Sunderland bucks the eligibility trend

A really interesting article from Community Care and one with big implications for the majority of councils which are busily tightening their eligibility criteria to the detriment of people who could benefit most from a preventative approach to telecare.

TeleMedCare has launched an advanced alerting system which lets the person talk to the designated monitoring centre or any of ten personal preset telephone numbers, such as a friend or relative, from the actual pendant. Details here or visit website.

Independent one-day telecare training organised by the Disabled Living Foundation and led by Jennifer Beaumont. Its aims are “to increase knowledge and understanding of telecare technology and its application across a range of client groups. It will use case studies to consider the technology, assessment, funding and ethical considerations. At the end of the day participants will understand the policy context and the drivers, be aware of the evidence base and sources of reference. They will also be more aware of the key elements of service user assessment, and identify a range of solutions to meet the assessed needs.”

This popular session takes place on 22 April and 22 October at the DLF HQ in London. £150 + VAT. Click here to book.

Speakers’ PowerPoint presentations form the recent series of CSIP Telecare LIN events can be viewed here. Browsing them may give you an idea of some of the things that have happened as a result of the Preventative Technology Grant.

When I began the ‘Themes for 2008′ posting last week with the comment that a trend had started concerning “the positioning of the big players… to take advantage of what many people believe will be the next big consumer-driven wave” I did not expect my comment to be validated so quickly, but up pops news that Bosch in the ‘States has acquired a majority shareholding in the ‘granddaddy’ of the telehealth monitoring companies, Health Hero. If the result is an injection of fresh cash, energy and research and marketing resources, then we can expect to see some interesting new developments.

In acquiring Health Hero, Bosch has formed connections to many other companies with which Health Hero has agreements, such as WebVMC and the American Medical Group Association. (The latter trade association has access to nearly 300 influential member groups, comprising some 67,000 physicians.) Bosch Care Solutions is a supplier (via Wealdon & Eastbourne) on the UK’s PASA National Framework Agreement.

Bosch press release gives the details of the Health Hero acquisition.

Which other multinationals are waiting in the wings? Check out the Continua Alliance’s Board of Directors to see which companies are represented there.

A Telecare Aware reader would like to make contact with anyone who can share practical experience of programming Tunstall controllers in the field by setting Tapit using a serial connection to a laptop computer.

Please contact me in the first instance.

As promised in the ‘themes for 2008′, I’m turning the spotlight this year on the issues surrounding the use of telecare, telehealth, telemedicine, etc. and the taxonomy of services and devices in this field. Make use of the new starting page (added to the navigation bar above) and of the new ‘Terminology’ category which will make it easier to search for all related posts.

Take a few minutes to read the introductory page, and then follow the link to an article that gets us off to a great start.

NHS Direct has issued an EU tender for Support services in the provision of Long Term Condition remote care management. The 48 month contract on offer is to develop a framework agreement and bidders are expected to have capability in the areas of:
- Programme design consultancy, preferably using models that have been tested and evaluated either in other territories or in the UK in large scale delivery situations with at least 3 years of auditable data
- Project management expertise (using PRINCE 2 tools and techniques) and risk management
- Care management software which is proven and configurable to local site requirements
- Care management training and on-going support
- Patient identification stratification, data extraction software tools
- Relationship management and business development capabilities
- Clinical governance and patient pathway
- Capability development in the integration of tele-health and telecare equipment

The notice will be published on the TED system: http://ted.europa.eu - with the title: GB-London: Business-development consultancy services.

CSIP’s January Telecare Newsletter contains a significant article for commissioners of UK telecare/telehealth services and implementation managers and, I think, suppliers will also benefit from understanding the matters it raises. Mainstreaming telecare during 2008: some current issues lays out in 1.1 Commissioning - getting the balance right the clash between the desire to use systems to support people in a wide range of situations and the pressure to ration in favour of people with the most immediate needs. 1.2 Costing and charging is essential reading for people working within the system but will probably be a complete mystery to non-UK readers. However, it provides stunning insight into why it is so difficult to do business in this arena in the UK and why councils are so slow to implement change. If you had to work in such a complex and perverse system you would be slow too.

Newsletter (pdf version)

Newsletter index page (January’s not uploaded at time of publication.)

Nice local story about the use of telehealth equipment to monitor people with COPD in Sheffield.

Attendees are invited to submit abstracts related to these themes so they may have an opportunity to discuss their work with leaders in the field. Abstracts will be published on the Med-e-Tel website and in the Med-e-Tel exhibition guide. The Educational and Informational Program takes place on the mornings and afternoons of the three exhibition days. The areas covered include, but are not limited to:

• Bio-informatics and intelligent clothing
• Cost-benefit studies
• Developing countries and ehealth
• eHealth and transport systems (air, rail, road, sea, space)
• eHealth applications in cardiology, radiology, wound care and other medical disciplines
• eHealth for prison systems
• eHealth strategies for the future
• Electronic health records
• E-Prescription
• E-therapy including e-psychology
• Ethics, laws and reimbursement for eHealth
• Facing threats and disasters
• Home monitoring and homecare applications
• Innovations within eHealth
• Long term data preservation and intelligibility
• Military ehealth
• Nutrition, Drugs and eHealth
• Secure data transmission and of community wide health care records
• Standardization and interoperability
• Telecommunication and wireless technologies for ehealth

The abstract must be prepared according to the guidelines which can be found at http://www.medetel.lu/index.php. Authors should submit one page abstract by the deadline, January 12th, 2008 by e-mail to Med-e-Tel’s Educational Program Coordinator, Dr. Malina Jordanova.