TeleCareLink

An open telemonitoring platform for cross-sectoral health and social care solutions

https://www.telecarelink.dk/

TeleCareLink is a 2-year project which will integrate two existing healthcare solutions into a new, open, Continua© compliant telemonitoring platform that can be used across healthcare and social care organisations to provide better services for citizens, their relatives and professional carers.

In-JeT ApS has developed a front-end for remote patient monitoring (LinkWatch) which is compliant with the International Continua Health Alliance reference architecture. With LinkWatch, various medical data can be collected automatically from patients and sent to Health Information Systems through a single home gateway. KMD has developed an integration platform (CareConnect), which allows healthcare and social care partners to share knowledge and patient data by connecting data and processes in different parts of the healthcare system.

The TeleCareLink project will combine these two systems and create an integrated, Continua compliant platform for remote monitoring. Further, TeleCareLink is fully adapted to the Danish national and regional strategies and future structures for telemedicine solutions. It will be evaluated in three different municipal care organisations in Denmark.

Rationale

The national Danish telemedicine Action Plan is aiming to establish a reference architecture and standards that support the widespread use of telemedicine solutions. At the same time, there is great need to integrate welfare solutions across health and social care teams, and thus across welfare sectors.

Project data

National project
Markedsmodning
Healthcare
7 Partners
Start January 2013
Finish December 2015
Budget: 3.6 mDKK
Funding: 1.8 mDKK

The TeleCareLink project will directly support the Danish regional telemedicine strategy (RSI 2011) and will implement a reference architecture as envisaged in the national telemedicine Action Plan (DH 2012) and will provide an open platform to support cross-sectoral welfare solutions with surveillance and monitoring of patients in their own homes and sharing of knowledge between the various formal and informal care.

Architecture

The TeleCareLink platform is based on an open service-oriented architecture (SOA) as suggested in the Continua Health Alliance proposed reference architecture for telemedicine end-to-end solutions as outlined in Figure 1.

The TeleCareLink platform supports the decomposition of the traditional care space (in clinics or doctors’ offices) into clinical and non-clinical care activity spaces and an information space.

In the center of the solution is the citizen’s “care activity space”, a processing and information space where both patient and caregivers interact with professionals in the health and social care sectors, i.e. local hospitals, clinics and practitioners, but also with informal care (relatives).

Figure 1 Overview of the TeleCareLink architecture

The “care activity space” forms typically around the patient in the home or when mobile. Professional therapists communicate with the patient either physically in the care activity space or via video or data link.

The “information space” is established as a coherent, cross-sectoral information which bind data together across health and social care system. The citizen and the relatives access the information space through a personalised web-based “Citizen and Patient Portal” for information and guidance about health and social status. The professionals access their professional systems via mobile and fixed solutions.

Technology

Health data are generated automatically from various devices measuring health parameters such as blood pressure, weight, oxygen (pO2), coagulation (INR), blood sugar, etc. For social well-being, devices may monitor cognitive status and mobility of patients through activity monitors, fall alarms, bed alarms, etc. LinkWatch supports around 45 devices and more are added all the time. The patient can validate data or add comments.

The LinkWatch platform establishes all interfaces (PAN, LAN and WAN) according to Continua reference architecture between devices, people and health systems as standardized web services and standardized data formats according to IEEE11073 and IHE-PCD Patient Care Device Domain standard.

The cross-sectoral integration is performed by KMD’s CareConnect platform, which is designed for cross-sector ICT support in the Danish health system. CareConnect has as a main role as a service to knowledge sharing and integration between health professional systems and citizen portals.

Data from the citizen’s status are sent by LinkWatch to CareConnect which forwards them to the appropriate data systems, such as KMD Chronic Disease Dataset. This common data set consists of two parts: One part contains the official monitoring data. The second part contains the data that do not belong in the existing source systems. Conversely, CareConnect contains services for reading data that are available over NSP and Health Data Network, including national and local services such as CPR, Yder, FMK, DAKe, LabPortal and LPR (Health Journal / e-Journal). CareConnect, thus supports cross-sectoral decisions and sharing of information among all carers.

Expected Project Outcomes

The main outcomes of the project are:

An integrated CareConnect and LinkWatch platform for Continua compliant telemonitoring solutions.
A Continua certified LinkWatch telemonitoring front-end for KMD Connect.
Identifying optimum front-end technologies in relation to citizens’ ICT skills.
Evaluation of organisational adaptiveness and impact of the integrated telemonitoring platform in municipal settings.
Establishment of three or more reference installations.

In-JeT’s role in the project

In-JeT is the leading device integration partner providing the LinkWatch platform to the project. In-JeT will lead the work on establishing user needs and will integrate the needed devices into the TeleCareLink platform. We will also develop the web service interfaces to KMD CareConnect and take part in the evaluation. Finally In-JeT will undertake Continua certification of the LinkWatch platform.