TeSan (TESAN) - Italy
TESAN is a private company supplying telematic home care services, including personal emergency assistance. It is structured to operate all over Italy, at present serving users in the regions of Veneto, Lombardia, Piemonte, Emilia Romagna, Valle d?Aosta, Trentino Alto Adige, Toscana, Lazio, Puglia, Abruzzo, Umbria and Repubblica di San Marino.
In 1987, TESAN was chosen by the Veneto Region in 1987 to run the home care and personal emergency assistance program established through a specific regional law in order to assist old people at their homes. This was the first case in Italy of such an institutional action on a regional level.
On the basis of the experimentation carried out on behalf of the Veneto Region at the beginning of its activity, TESAN has developed a significant experience, it has modelled its own services around the real needs of the users, and since 1993 it has gained the trust of more than 20.000 subscribers, thus achieving an unrivalled leadership in Italy and a primary role in the related international scenario.
The telematic home care services supplied by TESAN permit to cope with a significant set of social and health problems successively, including conditions of isolation, insecurity and unsatisfied needs, typically characterising lonely individuals and persons at risk.
The services supplied by TESAN are aimed at:
? allowing old people to stay at home and disabled persons to remain within their own families;
? permitting large savings for the public care service;
? activating the assistance in all cases of real medical, psychological or social needs;
? keeping systematic contact with the assisted persons, supplying psychological support and identifying their needs.
The personal emergency assistance program is based on the following activities:
? timely identification of arising risky conditions;
? quick activation of adequate assistance operations;
? careful monitoring of the evolution of an alarming event, controlling the effectiveness of the ongoing operations until the end of the emergency condition.
The program of telematic control consists of a regular agreed program of telephone calls to each sub-scriber, carried out by skilled personnel in TESAN. The program permits to:
? break the isolation of the assisted person by stimulating his/her activities, human contacts and general interests;
? monitor the personal and environmental situation of the individual, the evolution of his/her health problems and the onset of potentially risky conditions;
? point out needs of any kind and foster the links to other health and care organisations.
TESAN operates on the basis of a telematic structure distributed all over the country. It is a system of 11 call centres, 10 of which operate on working days during the daytime and collect the emergency calls from the corresponding local sub-scribers. In Vicenza, a dedicated call centre is active 24 hours a day and thus responds to emergency calls from all over the country at night and during holidays.
To assure adequate quality levels, TESAN built a quality system in 1996, certified by IMQ as compliant to the standard I EN ISO 9002, including the European extension IQNet Presentation Certificate, now upgraded to I EN ISO 9001:2000 (Vision 2000). In Italy, this is one of the first cases where service companies are being certified for quality.
On the basis of current developments in information and telecommunication technologies, computer-telephony integration and bio-medical engineering, TESAN has been undergoing an important transformation into a contact-centre-based homecare and telemedicine service provider, capable of handling and processing a variety of telematic voice and data flows. The mission is to supply an integrated mix of home care service solutions to both citizens (elderly people, disabled people, patients suffering from chronic pathologies, etc.) and the health and social service operators (general practitioners, specialist physicians, hospitals, social institutions, public authorities, etc.). To pursue this strategy, TESAN is actively involved in the following experimental projects at regional, national and international levels:
- Progetto Sperimentale per la Teleassistenza? (?Experimental Telematic Home Care Solutions Project?), a New-Service-Development project jointly carried out for the Veneto Region by the local health care authorities of Thiene and Bassano (ULSS 4 and ULSS 3) with the cooperation of TESAN;
- ITACA - Infrastruttura Telematica d'Area per la Continuità della Assistenza sanitaria (?Wide area telematic infrastructure for the continuity of health assistance?), a basis research project funded by the Italian Ministry of University and Research and carried out by a pool of industrial partners and institutional organizations (e.g. ISS ? Istituto Superiore di Sanità);
- SILC - Supporting Independently Living Citizens?, an R&D project within the IST Programme (5th Framework Programme) of the EU, involving universities, industrial companies and service providers from Austria, Great Britain and Spain.
