HEALTH SERVICE EXECUTIVE
The financial return is extraordinary , with an internal rate of return of about 1100 %. The support of leading HSE clinicians such as Dr Mike O ’ Connor and Dr Siobhan ni Bhriain has been of huge importance , because , as Erik Topol famously said , ‘ Medicine is remarkably resistant to change ’. A strong clinical champion is the most important ingredient for success . Prof Colin Doherty , a consultant in St James Hospital , not only has been the sponsor for a new epilepsy EPR currently being built in an agile fashion with IBM and Salesforce , but has been the main co-designer .
“ Together with major partner companies Centric Health and Roche , we have been able to reduce the rate of heart-related care home hospitalisations in one of the living labs by 10 times for patients with heart failure ."
Patient responses to treatment within the living labs indicated that they felt " a lot more secure ".
" They actually are monitored maybe a hundred times a year rather than eight ," he says while adding that " the costs for the monitoring are reduced by a factor of two or three ". Curley explains that the " overall strategy is about ' keeping well people well ' in their home ".
Tunstall Emergency Response and Irish based Pandu have developed a novel technology called a PanPan watch , which detects falls quickly and , within 20 seconds , connects the faller with a call centre in County Wexford and initiates two-way voice communication through the watch to see what help is needed . If the person is unresponsive , emergency services can be dispatched as the GPS locations are known . The PanPan watch allows 10 times earlier detection of falls , which has been shown to reduce average length of stay and , indeed ,
technologymagazine . com 327