It was presented today in Bari on pilot project of oncological home care, best practice for the Puglia Region, for remote monitoring of the vital signs of cancer patients. The initiative – promoted by the Ant Foundation and implemented thanks to MyHospitalHub*Pro, the platform developed by AdiLife and sold free of charge by Takeda – aims to promote more effective patient care, reducing both visits to the emergency room and hospital stays and improving symptoms of distress, anxiety and depression, for a better quality of life for patients and caregivers.
Launched in the Foggia area and in the Bat at the end of 2022, the project – explains a note – will allow hospital doctors and Ant professionals to keep continuous track of vital signs such as blood pressure, body temperature, oximetry and heart and respiratory rates of cancer patients cared for at home, who present significant cardiovascular and/or respiratory symptoms in order to ascertain the long-term applicability of the system. As the recent pandemic emergency has underlined once again, home care, if well managed, can become the only means of protecting various categories of patients, especially cancer patients, from the risk of injury, contagion and psychological stress, allowing sick person to be treated effectively without giving up the comfort of his own home environment.
“Meeting the needs of each individual patient is what inspires our daily work with the oncology community – says Anna Maria Bencini, Oncology Country Head, Takeda Italy – Our primary commitment is aimed at therapies capable of transforming people’s lives, unleashing the potential of innovation. But there is more. We want to help cure cancer by going beyond therapy with initiatives that support patients and caregivers through a wide-ranging approach that takes into account the socio-welfare and organizational context and places the attention also on the patient’s experience and psyche. Projects that put technology at the service of the oncological community, such as the one presented today, have a high value for us, because they create a virtuous circle of continuous innovation, which sees public and private work in partnership with the ultimate goal of bringing benefits to patients”.
Among the many applications of telemedicine, remote monitoring has the non-secondary merit of involving the patient in the treatment process – the promoters of the initiative point out – allowing better taking charge and management not only of the patient, but also of the increasingly scarce healthcare personnel.
“It is significant to have launched this promising pilot project in Puglia, where we have been present for more than thirty years – comments Raffaella Pannuti, president of Ant – Telemedicine cannot replace the work of doctors, psychologists and nurses, but it can make an important contribution to making home palliative care accessible to an ever-increasing number of people. At a national level, the costs of hospitalizations and the shortage of personnel, beds and equipment clearly show us the urgent need for a remodeling of the healthcare system that manages and distributes resources in the most appropriate way possible, in a scenario where health care needs will continue to grow. I would like to remind you that, according to the most recent analysis of our social impact, it appears that the Ant assistance model would allow an average annual benefit for the health service of 14,777 euros per patient, which can be translated into 4.84 euros of value generated for each euro invested in the activity of the Foundation”.
As the developers of AdiLife explain, MyHospitalHub*Pro is “a patient cloud management framework capable of recording vital parameters, notifying alerts on out-of-threshold parameters both on the healthcare provider’s dashboard and towards the caregiver, keeping a diary and a clinical dossier, manage the dosage of drugs and therapeutic schemes, notify reminders on the user’s App and carry out televisits and teleconsultations with the optional service that allows the management of a weekly nutritional plan directly on the dedicated App”.
“We are very satisfied with the excellent collaboration that has already been established for some years with Takeda Italia, which is developing and taking root with great effectiveness in various realities of the country, and in particular we are happy with this project, launched with the Ant Onlus Foundation – declares the engineer Martino Politi, president of AdiLife – The impact of the work carried out by the Ant Foundation on patients with advanced stage tumors, which admirably combines the social with the healthcare, is now enriched by the pillar of technology and telemedicine, fundamental in the new healthcare model of the future. Today it is unthinkable to do without digital: the Pnrr certifies it, which dedicates an entire sector to the development of home services and telemedicine, which are the heart of the mission of the Ant Foundation. Only with telemedicine, as in the project we are realizing together, can home care be made even more usable, especially for palliative care, and made it increasingly within everyone’s reach”.
The project presentation event – concludes the note – was also attended by representatives of an equally innovative initiative, albeit in a different sense: the ‘grandchild for rent’ program branded Senex, which declines its technological response to the need for assistance of the elderly, training young boys and girls who love technology to provide a digital home support and training service to those who are no longer young. Therefore, potentially, also to teach Ant’s patients to extricate themselves from the challenges of telemedicine.