Development and implementation of a national telehealth project for long-term care: A preliminary study

Received 13 July 2009; received in revised form 21 December 2009; accepted 23 December 2009.

Abstract

The aging population is a global phenomenon. The skyrocketing costs of healthcare and the shortage of healthcare providers will soon become a crucial issue all over the world. Taiwan's government executed the Taiwan's Telehealth Pilot Project (TTPP) from July 1, 2008 to December 31, 2008, using healthcare information technology to tackle these problems. The system has three different models, the home-care, the community-care, and the residential-care model to assist the elderly in the pursuit of better healthcare and improved quality of life. The results revealed both the home-care and community-care models facilitated timely medical responses if the enrolled patients had emergent conditions. In the home-care model, the hospital readmission rate was reduced from 8.19% to 3.17%, and the hospital visit rate was decreased from 2.95% to 2.90%. In community-care model, the medication nonadherence rate was reduced from 38.20% to 9.20%. In the residential-care model, reduced rates of readmission to the hospital, nosocomial infection and the adverse drug event were found. Telehealth enabled the aged with chronic illnesses to live independently and helped the institutionalized elderly get acute care more efficiently without increased manpower of healthcare organization.

Keywords: Telehealth, Aging population, Health information technology, Long-term care

a Graduate Institute of Medical Sciences, College of Medicine, Taipei Medical University, Taipei, Taiwan

b Graduate Institute of Biomedical Informatics, College of Medicine, Taipei Medical University, Taipei, Taiwan

c Department and Graduate Institute of Business Administration, National Taiwan University, Taipei, Taiwan

d Graduate Institute of Humanities in Medicine, College of Medicine, Taipei Medical University, Taipei, Taiwan

e School of Medicine, Taipei Medical University, Taipei, Taiwan

f Department of Pediatrics, Taipei Medical University, Taipei, Taiwan

g Department of Health, Executive Yuan, Taipei, Taiwan

h Institute of Hospital and Health Care Administration, National Yang-Ming University, Taipei, Taiwan

i Hsiao Chung-Cheng Hospital, Taipei, Taiwan

j Department of Dermatology, Taipei Medical University - Wan Fang Hospital, Taipei, Taiwan

Corresponding author at: 250 Wu-Hsing Street, Taipei City 110, Taiwan. Tel.: +886 2 27366485; fax: +886 2 23787795.

Corresponding author at: 250 Wu-Hsing Street, Taipei City 110, Taiwan.

PII: S0169-2607(09)00311-3

doi:10.1016/j.cmpb.2009.12.008

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