Telecare Aware

And the lucky company is… … the American Medical Alert Corp (AMAC). Frederic Siegel, AMAC’s Executive Vice President is reported as saying: “We are pleased to be working with Intel as the first Market Channel Partner for the launch of the Intel Health Guide. AMAC has been a leading provider of health and safety monitoring solutions for over two decades. We believe this new collaboration with Intel will greatly enhance our suite of digital health and wellness solutions to connect patients and providers and further our market position in the remote patient monitoring sector.” Full press release.

A survey of TelaDoc Medical Services patients found that 80% of respondents rated its physician consultations and other services at the highest level, “outstanding” and 17% of the respondents rated TelaDoc physician consultations as “good”. TelaDoc’s press release.

Item for the techies - in case they haven’t read it already. Eliminating Medical Device RF Interference

Yesterday Alertacall announced that Eldercare, the community alarm provider of Help the Aged, is the first strategic partner for its new Pellonia service.

The Ancient Romans were practical people, and the story is that they looked to the goddess Pellonia to help them avert mischief and danger and to drive away their enemies. She was therefore considered appropriate to represent a system designed to enhance telecare services.

So how does today’s Pellonia help? She’s It’s a managed system that enables organisations to:

• Offer their own brand of safety confirmation service (check end-user safety each day)
• Send automated appointment and medication reminders
• Improve mobile worker safety, location and management
• Co-ordinate operator reassurance calls
• Send automated mass telephone messages to clients

Perhaps unlike her Roman counterpart whose origins are rather obscure, the modern Pellonia has a known pedigree: it has developed out of Alertacall’s own need to automate features of its service. It appears that it will be easy to integrate into current services because organisations do not have to install any new software or manage the technology. This is done by the Pellonia team and is accessed securely by the service provider’s staff over the internet.

Owing to Pellonia’s scalability, Eldercare, as an official strategic partner, says it is ready to provide other alarm services with a range of complementary telecare and other monitoring services based on the Pellonia system. Chris Hopkinson, Director of Eldercare, is quoted as saying “Pellonia is an obvious choice for Eldercare. With it we can provide several new services to our clients and manage some of our own processes – for example mobile worker safety – with greater ease and efficiency.”

Read the Pellonia press release and/or visit the website. SeniorLink Eldercare website.

[At last, something genuinely new on the telecare scene! By the way, I think the press release doesn’t do justice to the significance of this development. Is there anything else around that gives traditional alarm providers extensive scope to develop new revenue-generating services – with half of the work done for them - which they can sell to new and existing clients, and which has the potential to generate cost savings at the same time?]

In October a Freedom of Information Act request found that one in four Primary Care Trusts has closed or reduced dementia services in the past three years and less than half have early detection services in place. Read more in HealthcareRepublic.

It’s interesting when two stories come in at the same time, unrelated except that they are tapping into the zeitgeist. Here is an example of this phenomenon. The first item is about the use of mobile phones in telehealth around the world and, if you think it is a bit ‘far out’ still, read the second item - Nokia planning to get into the ’smart home’ arena, including health monitoring.

1. Lives of a cell

2. Nokia develops a smart home platform to offer consumers new ways to control their homes with a mobile device

And, in a slightly difference vein, this story, just in:

Text message surgery saves Congolese boy

Not telecare, but a terminology issue as it refers to the target client group for telecare/telehealth companies. When I read about ‘the elderly’ or worse, the near-meaningless, ‘the vulnerable’, I imagine that the writer is probably hardly out of their twenties or thirties, or still has that mindset. If you want to alienate your potential clients, this is the language to use.

A brief read, with an American perspective, but with interesting survey results. Baby boomers? Older people? Senior citizens? Elders? What would you like to be called in your middle and later years? by Rita R. Robison.

A quick reminder that if you wish to present at next April’s Med-e-Tel conference the deadline for papers is 20th December. Submission details here.

November’s Whole Systems Demonstrator Action Network (WSDAN) newsletter was published on Friday and it’s starting to show some promise in terms of keeping the general world informed about the project’s development. If you didn’t get it, sign up for it. I’m not commenting on all the content.

First, the list of twelve WSDAN member sites has been published. These are sites that will get the ‘inside track’ on the experiences of the three demonstrator sites (Cornwall, Newham and Kent) and will be encouraged to apply emerging lessons to their situations. Some of these places were ones that originally applied to be a demonstrator site and all have interesting experience to pass back to the WSD sites. To take the first three examples, Barnsley has the longest-running experience of substantial users of Docobo equipment. Birmingham has been working with NHS Direct and Pfizer on the ‘Birmingham OwnHealth’ project and Croydon has both an excellent service for people who live at home with dementia [old Telecare Alliance paper], and its ‘virtual wards’ service.

The twelve WSDAN members are:

• Barnsley PCT and Barnsley MBC
• Birmingham East and North PCT and Birmingham City Council
• Croydon PCT, Croydon Council, Croydon Voluntary Action and South London and Maudsley NHS Trust
• East Riding of Yorkshire PCT and East Riding of Yorkshire Council
• Hull Teaching PCT and Hull City Council
• Lancashire County Council and Central Lancashire PCT
• Leeds PCT and Leeds City Council
• Leicester City PCT and Leicester City Council
• Lincolnshire Teaching PCT and Lincolnshire County Council
• Norfolk Social Services and NHS Norfolk
• Nottingham City PCT, Nottingham City Council and Brunel University
• Southampton City PCT and Southampton County Council

Let’s hope that being a WSDAN member doesn’t compromise their freedom to publicise their developments in the way it did for the demonstrator sites.

Second, the WSDAN newsletter contains a link to an article that goes into more detail [previous article] about the difficulties around setting up the project and it is probably worth a few minutes of most readers’ time. Whether that can be said of the accompanying PowerPoint slides you can download, is another matter. They may be stuffed full of useful data, but if that’s what comprised the presentation at the TSA conference I’m glad I didn’t sit through them.

Hard on the heels of the WSDAN November newsletter came the CSIP November Telecare eNewsletter with the eagerly anticipated round-up of the analysis of the Commission for Social Care Inspection (CSCI) data from the 150 social care authorities on their progress relating to the Preventative Technology Grant (PTG) implementation concerning the numbers of people aged 65 and over receiving one or more items of telecare, and the expenditure on infrastructure, equipment and services.

Here is a link to the main webpage for those analyses, but I’d say it is essential to read the e-Newsletter item first for the context, the caveats and explanation of how to use the Excel spreadsheets.

As this is the last telecare eNewsletter under the CSIP brand, I’d like to say ‘thank you’ to Mike Clark for the hard work that he has put into their, and their predecessors’, production for over three years. Without Mike’s scrupulous attention to detail and patience with horrendous data, we would all be much less well informed.

The London Telecare Group and JCA Design have produced a new poster that, with generous support from the Adshel and ClearChannel advertising agencies, will be displayed in several thousand London locations. London-based telecare services are also encouraged to order A3 or A4 posters tailored with their own local call centre details.

©2008 JCA/London Telecare Ltd

This Guardian article, reporting on Edinburgh following Croydon’s example of setting up ‘virtual wards’ of people being cared for at home, is slow to get going but read on to where it gets into some of the detail. It’s a service that arises from a distinctly different culture to the ‘Doctor will see you now’ item below this. Read it here. And oh, someone has just realised the model could be applied to social care…

[Additional information following the above post, this month’s sponsor, Project E-vita, pointed out that a client of theirs, Medihome, has been providing this kind of service for some NHS hospitals in London and South East England for a number of years. The NHS Department of Innovation and Improvement made a video about Medihome and Project E-vita as an example of an innovative way of delivering care to people. Medihome use the Project E-vita system to collect data about patients in their own home using MACIC, a PDA-based system that synchronises with the master record held on Project E-vita. Hospital consultants can then access patients’ records and monitor their progress. Nurses even take images of wounds healing and upload these for observation. Medihome provides two distinct services to NHS hospitals: ‘early discharge’, saving costs on hospital occupancy, and an ‘alternative admission’ service where patients that might be admitted through the emergency department are intercepted and assessed for treatment in their own home.

There are three excellent videos showing the system in use that are accessible from the Medihome home page.

Websites: Medihome and Project Evita]

NY Times story about the American Well service - consultations with a doctor online.

Could new web-based medical applications, coupled with the next generation of Bluetooth consumer medical devices, change personal medical care? That’s the question in a White Paper written by by Nick Hunn, Advanced Technology Director of Laird Technologies Wireless Systems “a global leader in the design and manufacture of systems for wireless and other advanced electronics and supplier of wireless technology to the medical market”.

Actually, I’m bound to like any report that begins:

“We’ve all heard about eHealth, whether it goes under that name or the equally popular aliases of telehealth or remote healthcare. For the last decade it’s been touted as the saviour of our healthcare systems, whether they be public or private, by letting patients take care of their own wellbeing and reducing costs for healthcare providers. Far from delivering that promise, it’s spawned a culture of pilots and trial.”

There are lots of other parts I’d like to quote, but here’s two:

“Current consumer medical device manufacturers have little understanding of web applications, or how to change their products into connected devices. Their expertise is in selling boxes that they can forget about.”

“One of the biggest opportunities could be for the UK’s National Health Service to grasp the role of international healthcare provider and make NHS a global brand, but it’s unlikely that will happen.”

This item on the Laird Technologies website has a download link for the four-page paper Trust me, I’m not a doctor – The changing nature of healthcare.

There is something significant in this rather pedestrian press release. It’s the admission that, despite all their publicity and marketing efforts, it has taken Medical Intelligence (Columba bracelet, Vega GPS bracelet, etc.) until now to achieve its first significant revenues from the sale of its monitoring solutions. That’s three year’s hard, hard work to get the ball rolling for a company with alliances with some big-playing companies, and in a market where, in theory, entry should be like pushing on an open door. It just shows how difficult it is.