According to this item from the local newspaper, Newham Recorder online, “About 2,000 people will take part in two new initiatives – telecare and telehealth.” The only trouble is you will need to take a trip over to Newham and buy the physical paper if you want to read much more.
Actually, the council paper cited in Telecare Aware on Monday said “The project will involve approximately 2,600 residents…”. So have the plans been scaled back by a quarter, or is someone just being woolly with the numbers? In the absence of any clear information on the plans we can only continue to speculate.
What we can work out is that with approximately one-third share of the £31m pot (less say, a generous £3m for the universities’ evaluation), it is planned to spend, with overheads, something like three-and-a-half-thousand pounds per patient (based on 2600 patients) in the project. Whilst there may be a good return on that investment for some individual patients, I think it is a safe bet that at that level of costs the project will conclude that it is not possible to make an overall ROI. We will just have to wait a few years to find out.