MEDICA DEEP DIVE: Telemedicine: how remote treatment can improve care

Lea Schomacher is an e-health consultant at the ZTG Centre for Telematics and Telemedicine GmbH. The centre is a vendor-independent and neutral competence centre for the digitization of the healthcare system with a strong expertise in telematics and telemedicine applications.

She is therefore aware of the problems facing telemedicine in Germany: "The German healthcare system is complex, the implementation of (digital) innovations rather challenging and time-consuming."
However, she is also aware of the benefits of such systems, such as telemonitoring: “Telemonitoring is a field of telemedicine with an increasing interest. It enables continued care which is especially important for chronically ill patients, to detect exacerbations as early as possible." That is why Schomacher thinks that we need a seamless and comprehensive integration of face-to-face care and telemedicine.

Dr Daniel Dumitrescu is a senior physician at the Clinic for General and Interventional Cardiology/Angiology; Institute for Applied Telemedicine (IFAT), Heart and Diabetes Centre North Rhine-Westphalia (HDZ.NRW). Telemedicine is already being used successfully in the Virtual Clinic NRW. It is used in two ways: firstly, as communication between doctors. And secondly, as communication between doctors and the patients themselves. Telemonitoring is also used here to help patients in the best possible way: "We are currently using telemonitoring for crisis management. We are trying to prevent patients from having another decompensated heart failure.

Daniel Dumitrescu sees a major problem in the fact that there is currently no funding for telemedicine approaches to health management. This means that the doctor sets treatment goals that the patient must follow at home until the condition worsens. "Such a concept would be extremely interesting for chronic heart diseases, as it is usually incurable and patients would be stable over a longer period of time".

Birgit Stabenau works as Business Architect Health IT at Philips GmbH, which is known to most people for their devices The companyis also active in IT, which now accounts for 20 percent of their annual turnover.

For them, one of the most important points is "telecooperation", which means that resources can be distributed wisely. For example, another hospital in the network can provide a different opinion, or employees can carry out tasks from home. "We have a skills shortage in the healthcare sector. We can address this by enabling people to work from home.”

For Birgit Stabenau, there are two major problems associated with telemedicine that need to be solved: "How is telemedicine funded and how is patient data protected? IT must be protected at all times."