University of Galway, Curam and Cisco collaborate on virtual hospital framework
Cisco, University of Galway and medical devices research centre Curam are working on a research framework for the world’s first ‘virtual hospital’, serving patients with diverse conditions at every stage of their healthcare needs.
As part of the Cisco Country Digital Acceleration (CDA) programme, the initiative is aligned to the ambitions of Ireland’s 10-year health and social care reform Sláintecare, to avoid unnecessary hospital admissions and support patients at home.
Unlike other initiatives around the world which deliver individual speciality virtual wards, this initiative brings together multiple clinical areas and stages of treatment to provide seamless care. These include community virtual care pathways for enhanced monitoring of chronic conditions such as chronic obstructive pulmonary disease to enable admission avoidance. In addition, it is enabling virtual outpatient clinics for remote appointments with integrated multiparameter diagnostics.
Underpinned by Cisco networking infrastructure, myPatientSpace and patientMpower mobile health apps will provide the virtual hospital’s digital platform with health metric and symptom monitoring data gathered from home. Clinicians will connect to real-time dashboards that display information on a patient’s condition, alerting medical professionals to changes so they can detect deterioration early and deliver timely care.
The University of Galway Health Innovation via Engineering (HIVE) Lab is bringing artificial intelligence to the project with applications like dynamic appointmentmaking, where patients with chronic diseases are automatically triaged to an appropriate outpatient clinic slot based on their clinical need. In addition, the HIVE lab has developed smartphone-based software that uses AI-enabled cameras to help monitor patients’ rehabilitation exercises to ensure that they are doing them in the way their physiotherapists prescribed to aid rapid recovery from operations.
Prof Derek O’Keeffe, project principal investigator and professor of Medical Device Technology at the College of Medicine, Nursing and Health Sciences at University of Galway, said: “This research project offers an innovative virtual solution to a real global healthcare problem. It will explore new ways of providing care to our patients using next generation technology and new clinical pathways to improve health and economic outcomes”.
The initiative expects to support hundreds of patients across the diabetes, COPD and heart failure and atrial fibrillation virtual care pathways in the Galway region. With the development and rollout of virtual outpatient clinics this is expected to extend to thousands of patients next year.
This latest project builds on other pilot digital healthcare studies supported by Cisco in remote parts of Ireland. Enabled by its CDA programme, this includes the Home Health project in Clare Island, home to an aging population of 160 residents and challenged by extreme weather conditions. Care solutions in the Home Health project include smart wearables to track vital signs; drones to fly in prescriptions; virtual reality headsets to deliver training for nurses; and a robotic dog to triage emergency health issues.
Curam director, Prof Abhay Pandit said: “This project is one of the largest industry collaborations our centre has supported to date. It is an excellent example of the impact that collaborations between Curam and industry can have on local communities and society at wide.”
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