New tech unveiled at country’s Smart Nation week.
A new tele-health prototype has cut re-admission of patients to Singaporean hospitals by two thirds, Steve Leonard, Executive Deputy Chairman, Infocomm Development Authority said today.
The demand for hospital beds in Singapore is growing faster than the supply, so the government prototyped a telehealth system with a small group of people. Patients took basic healthcare measurements, like blood pressure and heart rate, at home and remotely shared that with their doctors or caregivers.
“Even in the small controlled group that we’ve worked with we’ve already been able to identify 3500 bed days that we can save,” Leonard said at the Smart Nations Innovation event, part of the country’s week-long activities to promote the use of technology for public services.
“Now if we expand that group and we think about that in a bigger sense, and we just remember that we have a shortage of beds, we can see that even some of these basic things allow us to make a very positive and specific impact to how we serve citizens,” he said.
Another healthcare scenario Leonard talked about is how to ensure that patients take the right pills at the right time.
“Roughly half of patients don't take their medicines correctly - whether it’s [that] they don't take it at the right time, they don't take the right quantity, [or] they give up too soon. These are facts, and we know that as compliance drops, admission to hospitals goes up.”
One experiment of how technology can help is to have pills with microchips in them which could signal to a “patch” on the patient’s skin when the pill is swallowed.
“As the pill hits the stomach acids, the chip sends a message to the patch that says ‘I’ve been taken’,” Leonard said, with specific information on the pill that was taken. “That data allows then your caregiver and you to know, you've taken your meds when you were meant to”.
Read our exclusive interview with Steve Leonard on what a Smart Nation can do.
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Autor(en)/Author(s): Medha Basu
Quelle/Source: futureGov, 22.04.2015
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