OpenTele, a home healthcare monitoring project that is being successfully piloted in Denmark, is available as open source. The Danish government is planning to implement the software all over the country, starting next year. The software is available on Github and can be re-used by health care organisations in other countries.
"This makes ICT a low-cost commodity," explains Henrik Ibsen, co-founder and CEO of Silverbullet, one of the firms involved in developing the solution. "The costs for tele-medicine will, nearly entirely, be in the staff and organisation."
Development of the tele-medicine project was commissioned by government funded projects (CIH/TelecareNorth) and the license was entrusted to the 4S foundation to create and drive a community around the platform, that involves all interested several software development firms in Denmark.
OpenTele is based on Health Level Seven International (HL7) standards. It uses low-cost Android tablet computers, presenting participants at home with questionnaires used for monitoring, and combining clinical measurements with instructions and questions. "This assures not only measurements, but also provides a qualifying context for the measurements," Ibsen says. "In healthcare centres the data is presented in a portal designed for large scale use, where multiple clinicians can share access the same patient groups."
The system empowers participants, letting them keep track of their health care information, and greatly reduces the number and duration of visits to clinics and hospitals. This also frees up time for the health care professionals.
The project is a part of the Danish government's large scale tele-medicine project. The system has already proved its clinical and financial benefits in trials involving pulmonary patients and other projects involving hospitals in the city of Frederikshavn and several other towns. The region and the city of Copenhagen recently announced that they plan to continue using the system, and according to Ibsen, it is as good as certain that OpenTele will be implemented across all of Denmark.
The system uses open standards and is platform independent, explains Ibsen. The solution is developed and tested it on Centos Linux hosts, running MySQL. In Denmark it is run on a proprietary platform. The portal runs on the Apache Tomcat Java application server. Both the database set-up and the portal software are made available using the Apache licence. "We chose this one to allow many forms of re-use."
"The OpenTele project was delivered so much under budget, that this second version could be developed without refinancing," Ibsen said.
Silverbullet, based in Århus and Copenhagen, is hoping to sell support for running the healthcare solutions, offering support for any platform. "We're already in discussion with healthcare organisations in Norway and Sweden. In Russia a first project is now being prepared, and we've had some initial interest from hospitals in Germany."
For further information, please visit:
http://opentele.silverbullet.dk
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