The Virtual Care Pathway digital platform allows patients to receive high-quality, hospital-level care from their own homes, using remote monitoring technologies and telemedicine consultations.
Each virtual pathway on the platform translates into a digital ward. The same team of doctors and nurses will provide patient care through the virtual pathway as if the patient were in the hospital, says Dr Ian McCabe, who worked on the project.
At the moment the platform has a virtual pathway open to manage chronic obstructive pulmonary disease (COPD) at home and has successfully enrolled more than 30 patients and saved nearly 300 hospital bed nights to date. “We are just getting ramped up really as we get into the winter months,” says Dr McCabe.
“The broader picture is we are building a set of management structures, clinical governance structures, software, GDPR compliance, to allow us to do virtual wards across a number of different clinical disciplines,” he continued.
A single inpatient COPD stay costs approximately €6,000 to the system, amounting to more than €40 million annually for this one condition. This service has the potential to offset significant portions of this cost.
Future plans involve scaling the virtual hospital platform to include the management of other chronic conditions such as heart failure, diabetes and hypertension.
