The global pandemic is causing many sectors including business, education and healthcare to change and adapt to a new way of living. The increasing need to stay inside and prevent spread of infection can prove difficult for those in need of medical care and with hospitals coming under great strain with little bed space and risk of infection, there needs to be another solution for receiving this medical care. This need has led to a rapid adoption of Telehealth solutions globally (Source: The Lancet Global Health).

What is Telehealth?

“Telehealth is the provision and management of healthcare in which individuals manage aspects of their care with remote support from healthcare professionals”. (Source: The Lancet Global Health). Providing a Telehealth solution to those in need, whether the individual is based at home or in a care facility, allows the individual to be monitored remotely for as long as necessary.

The Benefits

In times like this one of the main benefits of using a Telehealth solution is to protect medical personnel and patients by reducing transmission of infectious diseases. Telehealth solutions also help to conserve supplies and bed space in hospitals by allowing low-risk patients to be monitored at home, helping medical systems from becoming overwhelmed. As well as this Telehealth offers time-efficient solutions and helps to formulate efficient and reliable healthcare plans.

Some other benefits include:

• An increase in healthcare access in Senior Living Communities by reducing hospitalisation rates for high-risk adults
• Minimising the load on healthcare systems and workers by providing relevant equipment to the patient for them to monitor themselves remotely
• Supporting specialties such as Cardiology and Psychiatry
• Making healthcare accessible for everyone including those who live in rural or isolated communities, and;
• Make services more readily available or convenient for people with limited mobility, time or transportation options.

The WiCis Health 3.0 Platform

A Telehealth Solution that we are able to provide through our partnership with Tech Data EMEA is the WiCis Health 3.0 Platform. This platform is the first HIPAA compliant Telehealth and Telemedicine Monitoring solution delivering the intelligence of the medical experience directly to a patient that can be located anywhere and in real-time by using cloud-based workflows, video-conferencing, and live vital signs.

Some benefits of the WiCis Health Telehealth Solution include:

• Compliant with the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act (HIPAA), including security provisions like data encryption to ensure the privacy of patient data and other sensitive information
• Pinpointing and being able to bridge the gaps between patient and caregiver
• Optimising workflows and improves speed, collaboration, patient engagement, and satisfaction

If you are interested in finding out more about Telehealth Solution benefits or the WiCis Telehealth and Telemedicine Monitoring Solution itself please contact us at info@channel-tools.biz.

Additional Resources:

• 6 Reasons Telehealth Is Now More Important Than Ever
• The Importance of Telehealth During the Coronavirus Pandemic
• Telehealth: Technology Meets Healthcare
• Using Telehealth to Expand Access to Essential Health Services during the COVID-19 Pandemic
• The Importance of Telehealth for Directors and other Decision Makers
• The Importance and Value of Telemedicine

The current pandemic means that ensuring personal distance of staff is a vital task for companies to manage. To prevent your facility from shutting down you should trace and document that the correct distancing rules are being followed. This will help to protect the health of your employees by providing distance warnings and tracking potential infection routes. The Safectory Social Distancing solution is a great way to ensure compliance and to reduce risk of infection to your staff.

The Safectory solution includes:

• Alerts when personal encounters with too little distance and of a certain minimum duration (15-30 seconds) occur.
• Reporting to assist the protection of the employees. The individuals affected but also the responsible manager can be informed.
• Contact chain management: In case of infection, contacts can be traced and informed.

The Safectory solution allows you to equip each employee with a BLE-transmitter (Bluetooth low energy). Any working areas are covered by BLE Gateways. The BLE transmitters send / receive signals to / from nearby transmitters and calculate distance (based on signal strength).

If two or more workers are too close to each other for a certain minimum amount of time the workers device will vibrate and the associated app will generate an audio-visual alarm. By tracking the distance, contact chains can be determined in the event of an infection and potential victims can be warned.

The solution is flexible in how you want to manage the movement data-recording and transmission options. For example, you may not want to record any encounter data at all and want to just use the tag to emit an alarm to make the user aware of the compliance with minimum distances. Alternatively, you may want data transmitted to the back end of the solution based on a time series, e.g. every 15 minutes.

In practice, the choice of the desired option depends on the needs of the company and the respective intentions and possibilities to establish its data protection standards.

In principle, the hardware elements worn by the employees function autonomously without any backend – however, user assignment or contact chains cannot then be traced.

Key Takeaways:

• Quick deployment and ready within less than 1 week from receipt of tags
• Modular, scalable, cost-effective
• Configurable

Contact us today if you are interested in finding out more about the Safectory solution.

This is an extract from an article written by Klaus Hast at Safectory. To see the full details, click here.