STARTS from Rieti, a small city in the Apennines of Central Italy, the project that has the ambition to revolutionize the health system of the whole country. And it starts with the sick. It is called Tessere Smart Share and is a telemedicine project designed for patients with rheumatological diseases: from rheumatoid arthritis to psoriatic arthritis, passing through Crohn’s disease.
What is Smart Share cards
From a practical point of view, we are talking about an IT platform that has the ability to interface with all the others that already exist: an aspect not taken for granted and which often represents an obstacle. From a conceptual point of view, however, it is a question of the possibility of finally putting centers of excellence, hospitals, specialist clinics present in the area and general practitioners in contact with each other; to trace the clinical path of patients with chronic inflammatory disease and related pain; to verify the diagnostic and therapeutic path of patients; to allow them, in case of necessity or impossibility of movement, to interface with general practitioners, and with reference specialists, according to a clear, pre-established and shared procedure. The network could also be used to monitor health migration outside the regions. In short, the project gives the term “telemedicine” a new meaning, finally in line with the times and with the potential of information systems. And with a social as well as a health value, because it will serve to eliminate the obstacles that today further complicate the life of a chronically ill person considered as a person in his entirety, as was emphasized during the presentation of the project (here the video of the live broadcast).
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The philosophy and the promoters of the project
“Telemedicine will serve to give life to a new culture of health, a total culture, which will have to network services to defend and safeguard the value of the person”, says Silvia Tonolo, president of ANMAR Onlus National Association of Rheumatic Diseases, an association that has promoted Tessere Smart Share together with the National Association of Rheumatic Patients Onlus ALMAR, the ASL of Rieti, the Italian Society of Rheumatology (SIR), the Italian Federation of General Practitioners (FIMMG) and the Italian Federation of Italian Pharmacy Owners ( FEDERFARMA), and with the supervision of the National Center for Telemedicine and New Assistive Technologies of the Istituto Superiore di Sanità. Many actors, all equally important, who worked together.
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Because we start from Rieti
The idea of starting from the ASL of Rieti was not born by chance: “We wanted to hear the voice of a particularly fragile territory, devastated by the earthquake in 2016. Starting from here – explains Tonolo – meant for us to unite the social to health, an action that we hope will be followed by others “. The technology, in fact, will be used to transfer the treatment from the hospital to the territory to improve, therefore, the quality and efficiency of the treatments even where there is a complex geographical distribution, due to the presence of small centers distributed over a mountain area. “Even the most disadvantaged territories and in difficulty for various reasons will be the protagonists”, explains the general director of the Rieti ASL, Marinella D’Innocenzo: “We need equal access to care even in remote areas and, moreover, a better continuity of care through multidisciplinary confrontation, adequate pain therapy care must be provided and, above all, a better quality of life for patients with chronic conditions guaranteed “.
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The revolution of the new telemedicine
The project has not only this objective: the information collected will also be used to create more and more home care pathways, to introduce new spending models and to offer real world data to support clinical research. This new organization, which really places the patient – and the territory – at the center of a path of assistance, also revolutionizes the governance of our National Health System: “From the vertical vision, for silos and spending ceilings, we would pass to a horizontal vision, where the data relating to the services provided are not confined to the perimeter of the Health Service itself but help to assess the impacts on the state budget as a whole and, therefore, to think in terms of welfare in the fullest sense of the term “, explains Rossana Boldi , vice president of the XII Social Affairs Commission of the Chamber of Deputies: “This would serve to facilitate the user’s access to public services, in which the user would assume the role of interface between data flows, authorizing or enabling their use” . For this reason, the Tessere project has also worked on the essential front of privacy and data security. The roles of the general practitioner and the pharmacist, who represent reference points for patients, are fundamental in this revolution. Remembering that telemedicine is – and must be – a medical act in all respects.
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