In a statement, Carol Williams, Director of Service Improvement, Cornwall and Isles of Scilly Primary Care Trust began by outlining the positive progress being made by the Cornish part of the Whole Systems Demonstrator (WSD) project:
“The Whole Systems Demonstrator project in Cornwall and the Isles of Scilly is already bringing real benefits by providing good monitoring for vulnerable patients and early intervention to support their needs at home. Feedback from patients has been very positive because they value their ability to track and manage their own health conditions.” She also pointed out that the work in Cornwall to help people manage their own long-term conditions was recognised through the 2007 Health Service Journal Award for Chronic Disease Management.
She then confirmed that as a result of Intel’s recall of the WebVMC Remote Nurse equipment, routine patient information is now being collected in person or on the phone so that the appropriate monitoring is still in place. She stressed that, as with other places using the Remote Nurse, there had been no reported problems with the equipment by patients.
Now without the Remote Nurse, the project managers in Cornwall and the Isles of Scilly are going through an accelerated EU tender process to select a new equipment supplier with a view to installing the new equipment in people’s homes by the end of the year.
For tender information click here.
The Pre Qualifying Questionnaire sets out the criteria, which I thought would be of general interest
1. Patients in their homes must be able to upload biometric information from their health monitoring equipment easily, safely and securely through a supplied patient home device into a supplied tele-health management system. There should be options for entering the bio-metric information through different means: connectivity from the biometric device to the supplied patient home device; and manual entry through the patient home device.
2. The bio-metric equipment must include: Weight scales; blood pressure monitor; pulse oximeter; blood glucose meter.
3. The supplied patient home display device must have a visual display for the patient instructions supported by audio.
4. The supplied patient home device must work over a standard telephone connection.
5. The supplied clinical application system must securely store these biometric results and parameters in such a way that clinical staff can easily identify trends in results or exceptions as tables and graphs. Staff must easily be able to see results not transmitted and breaches of parameters.
6. The supplied system must capture key patient information and GP details.
7. The system must be anglicised.
8. The supplied clinical application system must allow flexible set-up and use of care pathways as part of its work flow management and trigger messages and flag warnings to the appropriate agency and staff.
9. The system must be secure and web-based.
10. The system and products must have full CE certification.
11. The system is required to be based in, and managed by, Cornwall due to the messaging and security requirements. The supplier must commit to deliver this system (with live, training and test environments) by 4 weeks after Purchase Order.
12. The supplied system must be supplied with a user configurable flexible report generator.
13. The supplier must be able to demonstrate capacity to deliver 350 patient units to Cornwall with the first delivery December 2008 ramping up to 1400 total March 2009.
14. The supplier must state their current number of units live in patients homes in the UK (to be validated by PCT).