University in Ireland Introduces First "Virtual Hospital"
In a joint effort with Cisco, CÚRAM, and SFI Research Centre for Medical Devices in Ireland, the University of Galway is introducing the first ‘Virtual Hospital’ framework serving patients with diverse conditions, namely diabetes, COPD, and heart failure and atrial fibrillation, at every stage of their healthcare needs.
In a press brief earlier this month, Cisco stated that the virtual platforms will be able to monitor patients’ progress, provide them with access to educational materials, and allow them to participate in the decision-making process with their healthcare providers.
“Unlike other initiatives around the world which deliver individual specialty virtual wards, this initiative brings together multiple clinical areas and stages of treatment to provide seamless care. These include community virtual care pathways for enhanced monitoring of chronic conditions such as COPD to enable admission avoidance. In addition, it is enabling virtual outpatient clinics for remote appointments with integrated multiparameter diagnostics,” the news brief stated.
Furthermore, the brief highlighted, “To date, in the initial setup stage of the project in Ireland, approximately 350 ‘bed days’ have been saved by patients who have been supported at home via a COPD virtual care pathway as part of this project work.”
“The University of Galway Health Innovation via Engineering (HIVE) Lab is bringing artificial intelligence (AI) to the project with applications like dynamic appointment making, where patients with chronic diseases are automatically triaged to an appropriate outpatient clinic slot based on their clinical need,” reporters from TechCentral noted.
“In addition, the HIVE lab has developed smartphone-based software that uses AI-enabled cameras to help monitor patients’ rehabilitation exercises to ensure that they are doing them in the way their physiotherapists prescribed to aid rapid recovery from operations,” TechCentral reported.
The project expects to support hundreds of patients in the Galway region. This is likely to extend to thousands of patients next year.
