Home monitoring in Portugal: an overview on current experiences

Abstract

This paper aims to be a contribution to the discussion on the issue of innovation in healthcare since, in the author’s perspective, the health sector, and particularly the Portuguese National Health Service, needs changes in its "business model". There is a need of redirecting care provision to the citizen’s natural environment, namely considering the opportunities offered by information and communication technologies. For this purpose the authors surveyed projects already implemented in Portugal, within the Portuguese National Health Service, related to home monitoring, in order to make a critical analysis of the state of the art of ongoing projects. In this study, the authors identified four pilot experiences of home monitoring, all targeted at chronic disease. In spite of some results of these experiments are already known, there is a shortage of available information and scientific evidence, both about the implementation processes themselves and about their clinical, technical an d economic evaluation, which, in the opinion of the authors, also hinders their assessment and dissemination.