Indra leads a R&D project for telemanagement of smart medical treatment

Indra, the premier IT company in Spain and a leading IT multinational in Europe, is leading "Tratamiento 2.0" (www.tratamiento20.com), an R&D project that aims at the creation of a generic technology platform that integrates applications for smart management of medical treatments sparing patients visits to the health centre. The project is to be concluded in December 2010 and is subsidised with 8 million euro by the Ministry of Industry, Tourism and Commerce within the Plan Avanza R&D.

The team of experts is currently working on the design of the prototype for diabetic patients. Some applications have already been developed and the prototype is expected to be in operational service by mid 2010. This technology will have the capacity to be extrapolated to the teletreatment of a wide array of illnesses for instance hypertension (HTA) or chronic obstructive pulmonary disease (COPD).

The objective of this ambitious project is to make treatments more effective, decrease patients’ dependence, specifically those in a chronic stage and to follow up the illness closely through ICT. The technological solutions, currently under development, are oriented to facilitate user’s mobility-ubiquity and customisation, distance monitoring and interoperability of the systems.

Several entities both private and public participate in the project besides Indra, for example: the Universidad Politecnica de Madrid and the universities of Seville, Valencia and Zaragoza, the Department of Innovation, Science and Enterprises of the Andalusian regional government, the General University Hospital of Valencia and companies such as Techideas, Applus+, Airzone, EVITA (Grupo Altra) and Isotrol. The following innovation and technology centres are also involved in the project: CARTIF, the Institute of Innovation for Human Wellbeing and Tekniker.

This platform will incorporate technology that supports Evidence Based Medicine (EBM) to assist the medical staff in the diagnosis and to offer services for the treatment settings. EBM is the rational, explicit, logical and updated use of the best scientific evidence when applied to individual treatment. It requires a combination of the individual medical record with the best external medical evidence obtained through research and the personal context of the patient.

Besides the assistance in the diagnosis, the platform will contribute with the settings of the different treatments, so that the patient’s preferences, each particular case and the comments of the medical staff are included. This way, the situation of those patients who need constant medical attention will be alleviated as technology helps reduce the amount of visits to the centre. Patients will also feel more secure since their condition will be closely followed up and monitored. The medical staff will be continually informed about adherence to the treatment and the patient’s evolution. Tratamiento 2.0 also incorporates smart agents that detect deviations and alert both the medical staff and the patient.

The work packages within the project are considering the inclusion of an electronic tool to support EBM in decision making regarding treatments, integration of information coming from different medical devices and sensors or the development of a system to manage the adherence to the treatment, especially in the elder or chronic patients. Applications based on Augmented Reality and Virtual Reality technologies that facilitate remote customised clinical therapies and the integration of the Radio Frequency Identification systems (RFID) in order to control traceability and identification of the treatments, among others, are also being considered.

Teletreatment for people with diabetics

After a year of research, the team concluded the design of several applications that will integrate the prototype for the teletreatment of patients with diabetes, a group which along with HTA or COPD patients represent a high percent of the population that suffer from some kind of pathology.

A motion identification technology through web cams has been developed with the purpose of following up rehabilitation treatments by the doctor and a touch table with RFID reader for medicines that gives patients information about the prescription provided by the doctor or data such as the expiration date at the same time it informs the professional of the patient’s adherence to the treatment.

Besides this, there is further development in the design of a search engine to find scientific information in databases, the construction of the Unidad Central de Integración (UCI) so that the patient can interact with the platform while at home as well as the domotic tools and devices such as glucometers, pulsimeters or scales. A software to submit the information collected with the patient’s devices to the medical staff and educational games for people with diabetes is also under development.

Nowadays there are no systems with these features for the treatment of illnesses; therefore the development of a generic platform that can be customised in compliance to the pathology it will deal with and with the involvement of all the elements that can intervene in a specific treatment would present a wide range of innovative services with a strong added value.

Leadership in digital health

Currently, Indra’s health care management systems provide two thirds of the national population with services; for instance we can highlight avant-garde projects such as the electronic prescription in Andalusia, the first autonomous region to replace the traditional prescription with the sanitary card, Abucasis, a cutting-edge system at national level that collects all the information regarding medical records of the Valencia community or Ianus, the sanitary platform that integrates the Electronic Clinical Records of the Servizo Galego de Saúde (SERGAS) or Diraya which contributed to the implementation of the unique medical record of the Andalusian.

It is worth mentioning that Indra’s technologies and knowledge applied to health are based on its Salud 2.0 platform which specialises in Telemedicine, digital imaging, electronic prescription or electronic medical records, among others. This platform is the fruit of cumulative experience in the development of projects for private and public sectors, at both national and international levels, which translates into an opportunity thanks to system interoperability after decentralization in health care.

Among the company’s latest projects we can mention: SESCAM’s digital imaging systems (Ykonos) and the systems implemented for the Ministry of Defence and the regional government of Aragon.

Indra is the premier Information Technology company in Spain and a leading IT multinational in Europe and Latin America. It is ranked as the second European company in its sector according to stock market capitalisation, and also the second Spanish company with the most investment in R&D. In 2008, revenues reached € 2,380 M, of which a third came from the international market. The company employs more than 29,000 professionals and has clients in more than a hundred countries.