One billion euros will be invested starting from funding for the National Recovery and Resilience Plan (PNRR). Objective: to transform telemedicine from experimental, as it has been until now, to an integral part of the regional and national health system, thus helping to reduce the geographical gaps in health care, improving its effectiveness and promoting both greater home services for patients, that the effective commissioning of remote monitoring protocols. Puglia and Lombardy will lead the way in the implementation of these protocols and will be called to publish calls for tenders through which the other Regions and Autonomous Provinces will in turn be able to access funding for the implementation of telemedicine services, subject to the approval of their own operational plans by a Technical Evaluation Commission.
Integrating telemedicine into the health system
In reality, telemedicine has been talked about for some time and much has been talked about during the pandemic, when doctors and patients, kept out of hospitals or clinics, found alternative ways of confronting each other at a distance. Telemedicine, in fact, to quote the ministerial document containing the guidelines is: “a method of providing health care services, through the use of innovative technologies, in particular Information and Communication Technologies (ICT), in situations involving where the health professional and the patient (or two professionals) are not in the same location. Telemedicine involves the secure transmission of medical information and data in the form of text, sound, images or other forms necessary for the prevention, diagnosis, treatment and subsequent monitoring of patients. “
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But the many paths launched in patches throughout the country in recent years – most of them with teleconsultation, telerefertation and telemonitoring – are mostly the result of local, unorganized initiatives. The goal now is instead to standardize this type of services and make them widely accessible to all Italian citizens. With the hope that this will help reduce the geographical inequalities linked to the local territorial organization that characterize the health systems in the different regions. The services we are talking about are mainly teleconsulting, teleservice, telemonitoring, telecontrol. The latter with explicit reference to diabetic, oncological and neurological patients or those suffering from respiratory or cardiological diseases.
Lombardy and Puglia selected as pilot regions
Agenas, which operates as a technical-scientific body of the national health system and which carries out support activities in terms of health care towards the Ministry of Health, the Regions and the Autonomous Provinces, has entered into agreements with Puglia and Lombardy, identified as lead Regions and who are asked to be the first to initiate the acquisition of telemedicine procedures compliant with the Guidelines issued. These two Regions are also required to publish calls for tenders through which the other Regions and Autonomous Provinces will in turn be able to access funding for the implementation of telemedicine services.
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Before being able to access the calls for tenders issued by the two lead Regions, the remaining Regions and Autonomous Provinces will have to draw up an official Operational Plan in which to indicate the total expected needs for the implementation of telemedicine services. They will also have to distinguish which component of the aforementioned need can possibly be guaranteed with already existing telemedicine solutions and which instead they need to acquire from scratch. Regions that have already implemented telemedicine solutions in a relatively widespread way, in fact, would have the right not to make use of the new solutions proposed, provided that those already in use comply with the guidelines. A Technical Commission will then be called upon to evaluate the individual regional Operational Plans.