As a healthcare research and development manager, Dr Jean-Paul Dercq firstly points out that telemedicine covers several aspects: teleconsultation, telediagnosis, telemonitoring, etc.
For epidemiological reasons, telemonitoring applies primarily to frequent and chronic pathologies (cardiovascular and respiratory).An entire range of questions still have to be resolved: training for the patient and his circle of contacts, training for doctors linked to the process, formalisation and training in end-to-end confidentiality, integration of the results into the patient’s file, integration into a care process where roles are defined and monitored, alarms that facilitate readings, full prior information for patients and service providers on the reliability and costs, demarcation of doctors’ responsibility and technical integration of parameter monitoring into other functions to acquire a ‘user oriented’ tool: communication with service providers, the care and medicines schedule, rehabilitation, etc.
Finally, there is a need to integrate monitoring concepts into collective and electronic tools used to train users to understand the pathology, its treatment and tracking, coaching tools, the grouping of alarms and supervision of interventions and support decisions.
