German telemonitoring service provider Vitaphone has announced a joint venture with Denmark based RTX Healthcare, at Medica in Düsseldorf. RTX will provide its Telehealth Monitor RTX 3370 to customers of the Vitaphone telemonitoring service.
“The RTX 3370 is a wireless gateway which serves as a central unit for seamless data collection from measuring devices like blood pressure cuffs, blood glucose monitors and peak flow metres”, Niels Ole Andersen, RTX’s Engineering Manager told E-Health Europe.
Introduced earlier this year to central European markets, the 3370 has only sold limited in quantities but Anderson says interest from telemonitoring service providers is high, particularly in Germany and Switzerland.
The Vitaphone announcement at Medica underscores this assertion and is actually the third such deal, following similar announcements from the German ICW and the Swiss Medgate, which have made their solutions compatible with the RTX 3370.
“The hallmark of the device is that it is extremely user-friendly”, said Andersen.
Characterised by its small screen, around the size of a paperback book, the 3370 is able to link to compatible devices (via Bluetooth or a standard phone line) automatically, without the need to push a button.
It is also possible for the telemonitoring service provider to directly interact with the patient. This, in particular, makes the system different from other devices. “Depending on the disease, the provider can define a set of questions which are both visible on the screen and being read to the patient via a speaker”, said Andersen. No more than two buttons, out of a total of five, are needed to answer the questions. This means a service provider is able to gather information on vital signs and individual well-being via an electronic customer interface that requires virtually no computer literacy whatsoever.
Telemonitoring activities across central Europe have been increasing slowly and steadily for a number of years now. Good data is missing, but German market leader PHTS alone is known to have between 15,000 and 25,000 patients in regularly using its telemonitoring services. Medgate in Switzerland is expanding too, with up to 1600 patient contacts a day. However, this includes telephone call center activities as well as telemonitoring.
More than thirty German insurance companies offer telemonitoring to their customers and are paying for the service. Particularly popular amongst insurance companies is telemonitoring of patients with chronic heart failure.
It is hoped that telemonitoring in chronic heart failure will generate savings by avoiding hospital admissions – data supports that this is indeed the case in the short run. “But we know practically nothing about periods longer than six to twelve months”, said Friedrich Köhler from Charité Berlin, who is leading a big telemonitoring project of the Barmer Insurance company in Berlin with ICW and Bosch as technology partners.
Furthermore, many of the projects are being criticised for a lack of medical outcome control and for using old, or unnecessarily complicated, equipment. Given this history, it is indeed possible that the RTX 3370 will become a standard device in central European telemonitoring. It is easy to use, it offers the possibility to interact directly with the patient minus the need of web browsers and it may be cheaper than other easy to use systems like the television based solutions, which are being tested in pilot projects elsewhere.
Philipp Grätzel