Fostering a continuum of care

Abstract

Healthcare is facing demographic and socio-economic challenges: from an ever ageing population suffering from chronic diseases and various handicaps to the need for affordable "global" healthcare provided by fewer and fewer professionals and medical infrastructures. "Many healthcare systems around the world will become unsustainable by 2015. The only way to avoid this critical situation is to implement radical changes"[1]. Information and Communication Technologies could offer a way of changing how healthcare services are delivered to the citizens and could represent an effective tool to cope with these challenges. The CHIRON project (Cyclic and person-centric health management: Integrated approach for home, mobile and clinical environments) is a European research project of the ARTEMIS JU Program and addresses these issues. Its main focus is on prevention i.e. on a move away from 'health care' towards 'health management', from 'how to treat patients' to 'how to keep people healthy'. CHIRON designed a system's architecture making possible a "continuum of care" i.e. an integrated health management approach in which health is patient-centric at home, in the hospital and in nomadic environments. Care is moved from the hospital to the home and the healthcare staff is enlarged by adding informal carers to the medical professionals and by motivating and empowering the patient himself to manage his own health. The CHIRON system builds a personalized risk assessment of the patient by integrating personal information, data gathered at home and in a mobile environment through an innovative set of wearable sensors, data available at the hospital including outcomes of image-based tests. The expected results are a reduction of the healthcare costs and a better quality of care. © 2012 Springer-Verlag.