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HEALTH OPTIMUM
HEALTHcare delivery
OPTIMisation
throUgh
teleMedicine
is a Telemedicine project approved and co-funded by the European Community within the eTEN programme, that promotes the constitution of telematic and transeuropean networks.
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Current phase: Initial Deployment
In most European countries, healthcare is fundamentally publicly funded and mostly publicly provided. Healthcare spending represents a major component of state budgets, and has grown beyond what is sustainable. Member States are therefore engaged in an effort to contain the soaring costs of healthcare and, whenever possible, reduce them.
To achieve this, far-reaching reforms of the healthcare delivery systems must be considered.
These have to critically examine the delivery system as it is today - the result of over a century of organisational stratification - and see what today's ICT can do to rationalise the delivery system in ways which were still unthinkable just a few years ago.
During the previous phase, HEALTH OPTIMUM has market validated a comprehensive suite of telemedicine services able to improve the perceived quality of the healthcare services provided and, at the same time, to enable a reduction in the costs related to their production and delivery. The Project has also evaluated the users' acceptance of the services and validated a business model on which the HEALTH OPTIMUM Initial Market Deployment phase is based.
The primary objective of this phase is to deploy the HEALTH OPTIMUM services in the five participating regions.
These services have been successfully validated during the Market Validation phase which has been just completed. This phase has allowed for at least three of the participating regions, on the one hand, verifying the acceptance of the services by the various categories of users and, on the other hand, checking the economic sustainability of the underlying business model.
The expected outcome of this phase is an operational system which is up and running in all the five regions and which is financially self-standing because it pays for itself through the savings that it releases in the routine delivery of healthcare. |
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