Value Add

Chronic Diseases: A Global Challenge

Healthcare professionals are faced with the challenge to utilise existing resources in the most effective manner, while maintaining or improving the quality of care. This forces us to think about the most optimal form of disease management and integrated care networks.

Chronic diseases account for about 75 per cent of global healthcare costs and 85 per cent of all deaths. Managing populations with chronic diseases is a major challenge for developed as well as underdeveloped countries. Developed countries have started to take action to deal with this challenge but many of their initiatives are still in an early-stage. Most of the underdeveloped countries are struggling to scale isolated cases of successful interventions.

Healthcare professionals are faced with the challenge to utilise existing resources in the most effective manner, while maintaining or improving the quality of care. This forces us to think about the most optimal form of disease management and integrated care networks. Effective organisation of these requires IT solutions that go beyond the capabilities currently offered to healthcare professionals. For instance, software solutions should support task delegation, workflow, multidisciplinary cooperation, and extensive reporting, with the focus on maximising the quality of patient care. This is obviously a complex challenge, also given the fact that many patient need treatment for multiple co-morbid chronic diseases. Change is a constant for healthcare organisations and treatment protocols, which requires software that is flexible and covers a wide spectrum of disciplines. Current IT systems are too rigid in functionality, and mostly focus on administrative functions.

Software Platform

VitalHealth is the first global software vendor offering a web based platform that is generic and flexible enough to make multi disease management and integrated care network support a reality, for both care providers as well as the patients themselves.

Using a Business Process Modeling (BPM) approach, models and workflows can easily and quickly be adjusted without the need for 'hard-core programming', avoiding lengthy and costly development cycles.

Our Software

Vital for Diabetes solution and Vital for COPD-Asthma solutions are focused on treating chronic disease patients. Vital's next offerings will be solutions for other chronic diseases, such as Cardio Vascular Risk (CVR), oncology and depression. The company is also addressing the management of lifestyle issues, such as smoking/tobacco use or excessive weight.

Data Capture

Vital for Disease Management enables caregivers to quickly capture information that is relevant to the treatment of a patient, much like filling out a web based form. This simple, structured manner of data capture forms a basis for extensive reporting on quality and quantity of care.

Standards Based

VitalHealth Software Disease Management Solutions are inherently enabled to adhere to the most recent standards and guidelines for managing chronic diseases. Through flexible modeling of rule sets, the system can easily be adjusted or augmented with localised guidelines and treatment protocols. This enables caregivers to treat patients with consistent and proven high quality care.

Integration

VitalHealth solutions are inherently open to complex integrations with existing systems. This includes standards based integrations such as EDIFACT, making labs data and free text information accessible to Hospital Information Systems, avoiding the inefficiencies and inaccuracies of double data entry. More extensive integrations are supported as well, virtually a must in the current healthcare IT environment.

Proactive Support

Vital for Disease Management is primarily focused on the actual treatment process itself, adhering to published, standardised guidelines. Based on these guidelines the solution generates relevant check-points, recommended actions, treatment advice and referral advice. It also alerts caregivers to results that fall outside the norm.

Decision Support

VitalHealth Software Disease Management Solutions identifies (potential) problems at an early stage. Based on a flexible model of rules that can be changed and adjusted as needed, the system can interprete symptoms or out-of-range test results and alert caregivers as needed, or send a request to the patient to contact the caregiver. This approach enables early detection or prevention

Integrated Care Networks for Chronic Disease

In order to provide optimal care to patients with chronic disease, it is imperative that all the disciplines involved in the care process can

cooperate smoothly. IT solutions should not only provide maximum support for each individual discipline, but must also provide effective information exchange between the disciplines. To that effect, VitalHealth Software Disease Management Solutions supports the concept of 'roles'. For instance, a family practice physician will see a different view of the electronic record than a dietician. The solution provides role specific functionality and recommendations, with extensive support for task delegation between the different roles/disciplines.

Role based

Every individual discipline involved in the care process — such as physician, specialist, nurse or nurse practitioner, physiotherapist and dietician— is supported. The information presented in application screens is role-specific.

Patient Focused

Disease management is most effective when the patient is actively involved in the process. Through patient portal, patients can be given direct access to relevant areas of their electronic medical record. Patients can actively participate in the treatment process, for instance by entering information about their weight, blood pressure, dietary information or general well being, all from the comfort of their homes. Patient entered information is validated by the system before being added to the electronic record. Direct patient access can extend to education as well, Not only is self-management motivating for the patient, it also provides a more complete patient profile to caregivers.

Web based

VitalHealth Solutions are web based, and can be accessed from any location with just a browser and an internet or network connection. This ensures easy and maximum availability to users, which is important to both care givers as well as patients.

nsingh@vitalhealth.com