Large-scale eHealth initiative is launched

Royal Philips and a consortium of leading European healthcare regions, companies, universities and hospitals, today announced the start of the first large-scale care co-ordination and telehealth programme in the European Union to support tens of thousands of people living with chronic conditions.

Telehealth and co-ordinated care services may offer the elderly and otherwise-frail individuals the ability to maintain their independence for longer and enjoy a significantly better quality of life, but they also involve significant changes to the healthcare system and the recipients’ ability to self-manage

The three-year ACT@Scale programme will collect and analyse the health outcomes and economic impact data for large populations of chronic patients and elderly people to develop, test and consolidate ‘best practice’ care co-ordination and telehealth programmes that can be replicable and successfully rolled out across the EU. The programme aims to reach more than 75,000 patients in the UK, the Netherlands, Spain, and Denmark by 2019.

“Today, 70% of Europe’s healthcare budget is spent on patients living with chronic conditions, largely a result of Europe’s aging population and rapidly changing care needs,” said Jeroen Tas, chief executive of Connected Care and Health Informatics at Philips.

“Philips is committed to helping care providers and governments implement innovative, connected care delivery models that help improve patient self-management and care collaboration. The ACT@Scale programme will provide the evidence needed to successfully deliver a seamless patient experience with better outcomes at lower cost.”

The five participating healthcare regions are all in the process of rolling out innovative care co-ordination and telehealth services. Within the ACT@Scale program, they will share an agreed and standardised data set including programme outcomes such as the number of patients included, (re)hospitalisations, duration of hospitalisations, and mortality rates. They will also assess economic impact factors such as cost per patient and the impact on hospitals income models. This data is to support the development of new and sustainable business models. Next to this patient satisfaction scores are measured and the degree to which connected technology empowers people and affects health outcomes.

The regions involved comprise Northern Ireland (UK), which has remote telemonitoring programs to support COPD and diabetes patients, and manage maternal obesity; Catalonia (Spain), which has developed programmes to support nursing homes, reduce hospital re-admissions, manage complex cases, and promote physical activity; Southern Denmark, which is rolling out a telehealth programme to deliver psychiatric treatment; Northern Netherlands (The Netherlands), with programmes to provide specialist support for COPD, asthma, and heart failure patients, and connect healthcare and community services for chronic disease patients; and the Basque Country (Spain), which is rolling out programmes to support older people with complex health and social care needs, plus telehealth services for chronic heart failure patients.

“Telehealth and co-ordinated care services may offer the elderly and otherwise-frail individuals the ability to maintain their independence for longer and enjoy a significantly better quality of life, but they also involve significant changes to the healthcare system and the recipients’ ability to self-manage,” said Professor Erik Buskens, a professor of medical assessment at the University Medical Center Groningen in The Netherlands.

“ACT@Scale will allow us to determine the most cost-effective ways of implementing those changes while also maximising the benefits for Europe’s ageing population.”

The ACT@Scale programme will provide the evidence needed to successfully deliver a seamless patient experience with better outcomes at lower cost

The first findings from the initiative are expected to be published at the end of this year.

The ACT@Scale scientific consortium members comprise the University Medical Center Groningen (The Netherlands), Aristotle University of Thessaloniki (Greece), City University London (UK), Universitätsklinikum Würzburg/Klinikum der Bayerischen Julius-Maximilians-Universität (Germany), University of Hull (UK), Kronikgune-Centre for Research Excellence in Chronicity (Basque Country, Spain), Hospital Clinic of Barcelona (Spain) and Philips.

ACT@Scale builds on the successful ACT programme, a two-and-a-half year study which ran from 2013-2016 and looked into the results of European integrated care programmes. These learnings on success factors are applied to significantly grow the ACT@Scale healthcare regions’ co-ordination and telehealth programmes. The programme is part of the European Innovation Partnership on Active and Healthy Ageing (EIP-AHA), an initiative from the European Commission under its Innovation Union strategy, which aims to increase the average healthy lifespan by two years by 2020.