A New Social and Technological Paradigm to Assess Chronic Patient Management Process: Preliminary Results

Abstract

The present research intends to address in a comprehensive, transversal, and interdisciplinary manner the chronic patient management process in the research project named "PRO DOMO SUD" in order to identify operational inefficiencies, thus demonstrating that these are largely attributable to incurred costs and, thus, evaluate possible solutions for providing effective and appropriate responses by healthcare and social services. Can patients/older people be treated, monitored, and managed successfully with mobile and wearable technologies? The project involved three different groups of patients/participants: Patients with heart failure shock in "Home Monitoring Scenario"; Patients with different pathologies in "Virtual Ward Scenario"; Patients with limited mobility due to Neurological and Orthopaedic disease in "Rehabilitation Scenario". Due to the complexity of the issue, the methodological approach adopted must be multidimensional and interdisciplinary, addressing the complexity of the chronic patient from all viewpoints, not reducing it, yet analysing, understanding, rearranging, and managing it in an organic manner. The three different scenarios were allowed to identify several impacts on organizational and clinic management of chronic diseases, the tests showed significant improvements in quality of life of patients enrolled in the project. The data deriving from the three scenario demonstrate that wearable divide and ICT, in general, can empower both patients and physician personnel allowing them to be active part in the chronic disease management process. The PRO DOMO SUD experience derived from the Living Lab, this is a new paradigm for industrial research and development activities which allows the final users to actively collaborate with the designers and technicians in the development and test of new products and services aimed to them. The Living Labs stimulate social innovation by transferring research results from the closed industrial laboratory towards real life contexts where citizens and users become co-developers.

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