UK Says Telehealth Strategy Will Improve Lives of 3 Million People
Recent UK government strategy demonstrates the most receptive environment yet to help better patient case and service delivery using Telemedicine.
In December 2011, David Cameron launched the UK's Life Sciences Strategy. The strategy aims to draw in investment to support the discovery, development and delivery of medical innovations. In this strategy there is a commitment to accelerate the use of telehealth technologies thereby making home-based equipment that can send vital statistics of at-risk patients direct to clinicians a more available utility for clinicians and patients. The document outlined that the strategy will be in partnership with industry and plans ’to improve the lives of three million people over the next five years’. Such a result could position the UK at the forefront of global health care in this field.
The Department of Health (DH) published its headline findings from the Whole System Demonstrator (WSD) programme at the same time and conducted the largest trial of telehealth and telecare ever, with almost 6,000 participants. It was no surprise that these results would be positive, however what we now know is that if ‘delivered properly’ – telehealth could achieve significant reductions in the following areas:
- 20 per cent reduction in emergency hospital admissions
- 14 per cent reduction in elective admissions
- 14 per cent reduction in bed days
- 8 per cent reduction in tariff costs
Most strikingly, the evaluation demonstrated a 45 per cent reduction in mortality rates.
The DH’s short report makes clear that the best results will happen only where telehealth is delivered properly.