Yesterday morning the King’s Fund Telehealth and Telecare Congress opened with optimistic remarks from Chris Ham (CE King’s Fund), Stephen Johnson (Head of LTC, DH), and Prof Stan Newman (lead WSD investigator). Although the audience expected some results from the Whole Systems Demonstrator (WSD) programme to be announced we were informed it was too early in the days. DH wants to have all results firmed up before they are announced publicly. Suffice it to say that they look promising.

Telehealth has recently been on the forefront in policy and strategy discussions. With the urgent need to find efficiency savings of £20bn to meet the increased demand for health services under tighter financial times telehealth is viewed as a viable solution to improve health outcomes cheaper. Last November, 2020health, a think tank, published its ‘Healthcare without walls: A framework for delivering telehealth at scale’ report, outlining how telehealth can benefit the NHS and recommendations to mainstream the service.

Intellect followed this up with the health IT industry’s view on how telehealth can help meet the Quality, Innovation, Productivity and Prevention (QIPP) agenda. We launched our paper, ‘Realising sustainable QIPP wins: Opportunities for Telehealth’ yesterday which each of the 350 plus delegates at the King’s Fund Congress received a copy of. In the paper Intellect set out the industry’s views on the value and benefits of telehealth as a modernising tool to support the NHS as it seeks to identify significant efficiency savings and become more sustainable in the face of major demographic changes and rising costs. Through case studies from the UK this paper demonstrates how telehealth has a vital role to play in the NHS QIPP agenda.

We will build on the momentum and the anticipated WSD results and look at how we can build solid business cases, promote how telehealth can drive integration, work with the profession to communicate the benefits among other things. We’re starting with a session with the Royal College of Nursing next week. If you haven’t joined the group please click the join button on our telehealth webpage.

Technorati Tags: health IT, Intellect Telhealth Group, Telehealth, The King's Fund

Tags: health IT, Intellect Telhealth Group, Telehealth, The King's Fund

This entry was posted on Thursday, March 3rd, 2011 at 2:30 pm and is filed under Public Sector. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.