Home Tele-monitoring: Economic and Clinical Impact of the Service for Patients with Chronic Respiratory Disease

Abstract

The term “telemedicine” defines “the use of electronic communications technology to provide and support health care for infants, children, adolescents, and young adults when distance separates the practitioner from the patient, parent, guardian, or referring practitioner” (AAP 2004, 639).
The pilot study has been involved 71 patients with a telemedicine service of the Unit of respiratory insufficiency of the Regina Margherita Children’s Hospital of Turin follows actually and their caregiver. The scopes are mainly two: the evaluation the potential of control system of functional examination in the various expression of disease, and improvement the knowledge of the perceived quality of the service according the service users, in according to the economic and ethical impact. These variables are able to determine the actual usefulness of the home recorder-ICT device prescription at discharge of these types of patients, or when occur the conditions of necessity, or in case of Centre take charge of new patients. Patients assessed effectiveness home tele-monitoring service and patient’s satisfaction through semi-structured questionnaires.
The administering of the questionnaires took place during the day hospital, or during office visits/outpatient visits, or during occasional hospitalizations.
The analysis is extended to the economic and budgetary aspects, focusing on comparisons of spending between traditional medicine and telemedicine, investigating whether there is a correlation between patient satisfaction and reduced spending by telemedicine
The analysis of the data showed interesting results in order to improve the type of service offered to these patients, also in term of economic and social results.