Innovation in telemedicine to monitor patients with high blood pressure, and also, ex-smokers
A spin-off of the University of Lleida has created two software programs that allow personalised monitoring via telephone and Internet.
BY BIOCAT
Hesoft Group, a spin-off that emerged from the Technological Trampoline of the Universitat de Lleida (UdL) specialised in custom telemedicine solutions for the healthcare sector, just received one of the Bancaja 2010 Young Entrepreneur Awards for an IT application for the control, administration and management of patients with high blood pressure, which is in the testing phase in two hospital centres.
This software allows the healthcare personnel to monitor and manage automatically hypertension through telematics (mobile phone, telephone or Internet). This will provide economic and time savings, since the gathering of remote data avoids the unnecessary travel to the medical centres.
Telemedicine to monitor ex-smokers
The Hesoft researchers have also created a computer program that supports the monitoring and diagnosis of patients who want to stop smoking. Thanks to continuous contact by means of telephone SMS and Internet messages, the health professionals can carry out technical and psychological monitoring of the smoker and warn about risk situations in which the patient can break the discipline of abstinence.
Josep Cuadrado, member of the IT Department of the Distribuidora Farmacéutica Leridana (DIFALE) and Francesc Solsona, professor of the Escola Politècnica Superior of the UdL, in collaboration with two IT engineers, Jordi Vilaplana and Ivan Josa, have designed this software, called CP-F (Monitoring of Smoker Patients), from the assignment of the Tobacco Use Unit of the Hospital Santa Maria of Lleida.
Cuadrado and Solsona have been developing, expanding and improving a project that is designed to go beyond the creation of a program centred on computerized patient management and his clinical history. The software allows displaying in a web page the progressive graphs of the patient's condition and the risk situations, and generate warnings or suggestions on treatments, medicines and alimentary diets by SMS.
Of the three aspects that the physicians value as basic for overcoming tobacco use —detoxifying the patient from the nicotine, distancing him from the habit of smoking and making the process experienced by the patient be as comfortable and pleasant as possible— the creators of the CP-F consider that their product impacts especially on the third point, since it allows the medical professional to monitor with more efficiency the "fidelity" of the user to the prescribed discipline and at the same time to help the patient not to abandon the treatment, since he feels "accompanied, protected and guided" during the entire process. Up to now it has been tested in 200 patients, of which 90% stated that receiving personalized SMS frequently helped them overcome the addiction.
In the near future, they foresee taking on other medical specialities such as gynaecology or treating addictions such as alcoholism.