Telemedicine Solutions and Services: a new challenge that supports active participation of patients

One of the main issues that healthcare is focusing on is the aging population, which will lead to an ever-increasing rise in all the costs associated with prevention, diagnosis and treatment. In addition, the spread of an active aging culture (patient empowerment) will be addressed through the availability of the Internet and mobile technologies that can move the prevention, diagnosis and care pathways to the patient’s home and engage Healthcare facilities (facilities, personnel, machinery) only in cases of urgency or clinical expertise. The scenario that this paper aims to face is that of proximity medicine, with a strong passage from the Hospital to the Territory, from the Territory to the domestic dimension, through: - The use of advanced sensors for monitoring and administering patient home-based therapies. - The establishment of private local service centers with emergency / urgency management but also continuity of care close to patients, as well as the spread of territorial services through teleconsultation and television technologies, leaving hospitals the most important management phase of acute phases and specialized investigation. - Assisting virtual assistants as a mobile app. The Telemedicine Platform developed in Exprivia focuses on the treatment of chronicity and early prevention of the onset of complications by the use of “care pathway” protocols (in Italy denoted as PDTA - Percorsi Diagnostico Terapeutici Assistenziali) for diagnosis, treatment and care of the patient, which also includes data analytics. Then, the primary objective of PDTA is the optimization of care, aiming in particular at the reduction of unjustified variations of the clinical practice and also of the healthcare costs, thanks to many factors, such as their crossfunctional and multi-disciplinary nature, and their integrated and cooperative coverage in both the hospital and extra-hospital environment. The Telemedicine Platform is a real IoT platform, where its components allow to analyze complex events. Through the use of analytics techniques, it is possible to classify and cluster events and data that come from sensors for evaluation in terms of supporting medical decisions. In addition, predictive models can prevent the onset of complications in the health of the chronic patient. The final aim of the Telemedicine Platform is giving the patients a central role, guaranteing continuous services in order to improve the quality of life and, at the same time, helping to limit the costs of the local health authorities and hospitals by removing the patient from the hospital. At the same time, it supports all operators involved in the care and monitoring of the patient at home and revolutionizes the approach to home patient care by providing the technological infrastructure and all the services necessary for the full, integrated management of all the caregiving processes and services, accessible and usable from any kind of device: Remote monitoring, Telemedicine and Teleconsulting, Medicinal product procurement monitoring, Reporting and filing systems, Patients medical history in health dossiers and electronic folders.