United4Health
Universal solutions in telemedicine deployment
for European health care
Project description
United4Health was partially funded under the ICT Policy Support Programme (ICT PSP) as part of the Competitiveness and Innovation Framework Programme (CIP) by the European Community. It aimed to exploit and further deploy innovative telemedicine services implemented and trialled under the RENEWING HeALTH project.
Interventions were selected from among the basket of those already validated or under validation in RENEWING HeALTH. They were trialled in 15 regions to guarantee aggregation of data and comparability of results. All service solutions adopted a patient centred approach and involved the telemonitoring and the treatment of chronic patients with diabetes, pulmonary (COPD), or cardio-vascular diseases.
Services were designed to give patients a central role in the management of their diseases: they finetuned the choice and dosage of medications, promoted compliance to treatment, and helped professionals to detect early signs of patients’ diseases worsening. The services implemented were: life-long management of diabetes, short-term follow-up after hospital discharge for COPD patients, and remote monitoring of congestive heart failure.
- Watch the video "EHTEL presenting RENEWING HeALTH"
- Watch the “United4Health” videos (testimonials, interviews, project presentations)
The project operated as a multi-centre clinical trial, measuring efficiency and the cost effectiveness of the implemented solutions. It gave scientific validity to its results, promoted adoption of remote patient monitoring, and treatment on a large scale.
The effectiveness of the solutions was evaluated using the newly developed “Model for Assessment of Telemedicine Applications” (MAST).
MAST, developed by two of the partners and financed by the European Commission between 2009 and 2011, is a method of choice for evaluating healthcare projects.
While the RENEWING HeALTH project was designed as a Randomized Control Trial, United4Health was built as an observational study, to reflect as much as possible field conditions.
- Learn more about MAST
The project was supported by national health authorities of the participating regions which had responsibility for the healthcare budget; they were fully committed to deploy the telemedicine services in their territories and to co-operate among themselves to promote the further uptake of the services at pan-European level.
EHTEL's role
EHTEL was Work Package leader for WP2 dissemination and WP4 Policy Advisory Board.
Towards the future
EHTEL members continue to maintain interests in areas of work such as:
- a wide variety of chronic conditions (e.g., cardio-vascular diseases, and diabetes)
- evaluation methods of projects e.g, MAFEIP
- use of other evaluation tools and methods e.g., MOMENTUM.
This project offered EHTEL and its members a next step into the SCIROCCO project.
The project United4Health was co-funded by the ICT Policy Support Programme (ICT PSP)
as part of the Competitiveness and Innovation Framework Programme by the European Commission.
***For more information visit the project website***
