Objective
REMEDESTM is pioneering already-established technologies to demonstrate the technical and commercial benefits of network and added value services in European health care. It will initially target general practitioners and other health professionals outside hospitals as the first contact points for most patients. The project will involve live user-friendly telematics contact between widely separated or remotely located staff, and flexible data manipulation based on international standards. Applications will include test requests and results reporting, the issuing and dispensing of prescriptions and several added-value services.
REMEDES is a project aimed at demonstrating the technical and commercial viability of network and added value services for Health Care professionals and institutions at large, and their impact on the quality of care. The initial effort will be concentrated on GPs and Primary Care, because of the increasing role that they have to play in most Health Care Systems as gatekeepers to the whole of the Health Care System itself. REMEDES capitalises on the results of a Feasibility Study on Telemedicine carried out for the Commission under the Euro-ISDN initiative.
The general characteristics of REMEDES will be the following:
- real time linking and interaction between remote Health Care providers;
- support of shared care protocols between involved Health Care players;
- recording of patient data according to existing or "de-facto" international standards in order to provide maximum flexibility in data exchange and data manipulation;
- incorporation of multi-media capability into message transfers;
- high degree of user friendliness.
The project will provide the application services set out below:
- Pathology test request & results reporting;
- Diagnostic test request & results reporting;
- Referral/Outpatient booking;
- Hospitalisation request;
- Prescription issuing and dispensing.
As part of the REMEDES service, in addition to the basic services described above, the application services will include a number of additional, value added services. The scope of these is being determined as part of the Study into Telemedicine Using Euro-ISDN, and is likely to vary from service to service. However, they are likely to include some or all of:
- reminders of outstanding clinical service requests;
- checklists (paper or electronic) of clinical services provided to either initiate or check the invoicing for the services;
- analysis of elapsed time between requests for clinical services, and completion of the service;
- comparative analysis between clinical service providers, to highlight areas of best practice, and areas for improvement, for use by either the providers themselves, or the requesters;
- comparative analysis of services requested;
- provide (anonymous) data for epidemiological analysis, for example by geographic area, against demographic markers, etc.
REMEDES uses mainly existing and consolidated state-of-the-art technologies applied to the transfer of and remote access to multimedia medical information.
The benefits of the REMEDES project are expected to be twofold:
- The project is expected to deliver significant clinical benefits to both GPs and others, both through the main primary services described above, and also through the secondary services.
- The project aims to prove the commercial viability of the service, based on the concept that the service helps to reduce the total cost to the community of administrating health care to a given set of citizens. Savings released from the service are used to pay for the service itself through mechanisms that the Study on Telemedicine using Euro-ISDN will have identified by the time the REMEDES service is ready to start.
REMEDES is innovative because of the following aspects:
real involvment of users - in REMEDES users are involved throughout the entire life cycle of the project, they are represented in the Project Board and are always seen as peer. Their support for the service and willingness to use it in the exploitation phase is the key to the success of the project;
European scope and vision - unlike most cooperative projects, REMEDES is steered centrally and all the partners share the same vision of what the service should offer to users and Health Authorities. Central management guarantees a uniform and consistent way of approaching the service in each of the participating countries;
scale - REMEDES aims at a significant population of users in each of the pilot sites to guarantee the general validity of the results;
geographical scope - the three member countries participating in the validation phase account for 45% of the total population of the EU and are representative of both Southern and Northern Europe;
selection criteria for pilot sites - all the pilots have been selected because they are seen as opinion makers in their countries and their participation in the trials will create emulation among other helth structures in their respective countries;
long term commitment - the two main industrial partners of REMEDES have publicly stated their commitment to develop and provide application services for Health Care throughout the EU, in partnership with local players
Fields of science
Call for proposal
Data not availableFunding Scheme
CSC - Cost-sharing contractsCoordinator
1030 Bruxelles
Belgium