In Ogliastra, telemedicine is a reality. After completing the experimentation, carried out in 2019 on 100 patients, the project started with the first three patients, all from Tortolì, affected by COPD (Chronic Obstructive Pulmonary Disease), the third cause of death in the world.
Patients are constantly monitored at home but in case of critical situations they can contact a doctor. The service was developed in partnership with the university hospital of the Bio-Medico campus in Rome. Thanks to this innovative model of patient care, in fact, it was possible to obtain a significant reduction in exacerbations (-70 percent) and visits to the emergency room (-96 percent).
"The technology that allows patients to be "telemonitored" consists of an app with an artificial intelligence "heart", explains Giuseppe Capasso, CEO of Bpco Media, a spin-off of the Bio-Medico campus in Rome and coordinator of the new telemonitoring service, "which is installed on the patient's or caregiver's cell phone, and a Bluetooth pulse oximeter (the classic clip that is placed on the finger to measure saturation and heart rate) that is used to record the patient's cardiorespiratory functions. These measurements", continues Capasso, "must be carried out three times a day".
The patient's data is transmitted to a dashboard managed by a clinical team located in the Tortolì polyclinic. Whenever the device signals an "alert" the patient must contact a nurse from the monitoring team or their own doctor. "The use of this telemedicine system," continues Angela Bussu, a pulmonologist at ASL Lanusei, "allows us to provide targeted and contextual assistance to a much greater number of patients, monitoring the disease and, if necessary, correcting the therapy and identifying important alterations." The project's goal now is to reach 40 patients by the end of the year.