About TeleCare Nord

Telehealth Solution

TeleCare Nord provides patients with chronic obstructive pulmonary disease (COPD) or heart failure with a telehealth kit that enable them to monitor their health from the comfort of their own home. The kit includes a small tablet, a blood pressure monitor, a pulse oximeter, and a weighing scale. Patients are required to perform measurements with the telehealth equipment 1-2 times a week. In addition to performing these measurements, patients also answer a questionnaire about their symptoms. The measurements and recordings are sent electronically to healthcare professionals, who review the data and provide timely advice and interventions as needed. To receive the telehealth kit, patients must be referred to the telemedicine service by a hospital physician or their general practitioner.

Results from the Use of the Telehealth Kit

Using telemedicine, patients are generally able to better understand their health condition and their symptoms. In addition to this, research projects have demonstrated that telemedicine leads to a reduction in hospital admissions, improved quality of life, increased patient empowerment, and overall greater peace of mind in daily life. In addition to improving quality-adjusted life years, telemedicine also provides economic savings, related to fewer hospital admissions.
In the North Denmark Region, approximately 45.000 people live with COPD and around 6.000 people live with heart failure. Despite the significant number of people affected by these conditions, only a small fraction take advantage of our telemedicine services. This limited participation is largely due to a lack of awareness about the telemedicine offer among both healthcare professionals and citizens. 

Scaling Telemedicine

The positive outcomes from telemedicine highlight the potential of innovative healthcare solutions in improving the well-being of patients. Moving forward, our goal is to scale our telemedicine services to reach a broader population and cover a wider range of diseases and diagnoses, ensuring that more citizens can benefit from the many positive outcomes of telemedicine. As part of the scaling, we are working on projects, focused on diabetes and multimorbidity patients. Scaling telemedicine, however, requires awareness and knowledge from both patients and healthcare professionals about the use of telemedicine and its benefits. In order to scale telemedicine further and refine the monitoring system, all 5 Danish regions and 98 municipalities has developed and implemented a national telemedicine infrastructure and a monitoring application named Telma; Telemedicine Monitoring Application. Since Telma is integrated with this new infrastructure, the scaling of telemedicine services reaches a higher and national level, as all regions and municipalities will operate on the same application which benefits both patients and healthcare professionals.

Research Articles regarding TeleCare Nord

For more details on the scientific research in telemedicine, please refer to the articles linked below. For more information about TeleCare Nord, our contact information is available at the bottom of this page.

TeleCare Nord is registered in the research database: clinicaltrials.gov under the number NCT01984840.