Telematics for diabetes care
Diabetes results in metabolic changes and chronic complications such as neurological, renal, cardiovascular, and cerebrovascular conditions. Diabetes affects about 30 million people in the European Union, while 20% of patients need insulin therapy. According to recent medical research, Intensive Insulin Therapy could attain improved metabolic control and this could prevent or delay chronic complications. However, frequent insulin injections, precise blood glucose monitoring, and surveillance by health care professionals are needed. In addition, this procedure requires a lot of time and is expensive. A European project, Telematic Management of Insulin Dependent Diabetes Mellitus, aims at reducing the cost and time devoted to insulin therapy. The project did this through telematics management so as to monitor patients and facilitate their access to treatment. One unit helps patients with local consultation processes, autonomous decision-support tools and teleconsultation to the remote medical workstation. The workstation assists doctors with chronic management of the patients in terms of insulin timing and amounts, and diet schemes. These units can intercommunicate so therapeutic strategies are given to the patient while the patient then sends relevant information to the workstation. In addition, the project aims at giving a sustainable service care to residential and mobile diabetics. This would then improve the quality of a patient’s care by improving communication between patients and caregivers. Multi-Access Services for Telematic Management of Diabetes Mellitus (M2DM) consists of novel telemedicine services. These services provide personal health services 24 hours a day and information access for doctors and patients. M2DM gives the capability of effectively managing the knowledge that is needed for chronic disease care. A Multi-Access Server comprises inexpensive information technologies that give users on-line and cost-effective access to telemedicine and information. The multi-access services provided by M2DM will effectively help diabetes mellitus patients and doctors with chronic disease care.
