Residents at Beverwyck assisted-living home in Albany get weekly checkups at an electronic kiosk in the lobby. “I want to make sure I’m alive every morning,” jokes 87-year-old Thomas DiFrancesco…Though there is little hard data tracking its growth, there is mounting evidence that more people are using telemedicine. The number of companies manufacturing home telecare devices in the last three years has tripled to 15, and the Veterans Administration plans to double the number of patients it puts on home telecare to 20,000 during the next year…
Residential home telehealth kiosks (US)
March 23rd, 2006Telecare Alliance website update
March 21st, 2006We have made a few changes to the structure of our main website to make it easier to find content by navigation, and added a ‘What is Telecare?’ page under ‘Telecare for you’.
If you have added some particular pages to your Favorites list, they should still work, but you might want to check.
Social care funds face shortfall
March 21st, 2006BBC report on social services finances. Read more.
Telecare for people with learning disabilities
March 21st, 2006Tunstall press release promoting its Learning Disabilities Technology Guide. Read more.
Self-install alert system (US)
March 21st, 2006See how a basic alarm system can be sold over the internet. See here.
Retiring to Spain?
March 21st, 2006Read these thought-provoking statistics on numbers of older people and carers in the province of Malaga. Also has interesting section at the end re Spain’s forthcoming equivalent of FACS. Read more.
6th Nordic Conference on eHealth and Telemedicine
March 21st, 2006The 6th Nordic Conference on eHealth and Telemedicine (NCeHT2006) will be held in Helsinki, Finland, on August 31 and September 1, 2006 with the theme: “From Tools to Services”. NCeHT2006 is the biannual scientific meeting of the Nordic Telemedicine Association. This year’s event will combine insights from the Nordic countries, who have been pioneers in the fields of telemedicine and eHealth, with the experiences and outlook of a wider European and international audience. Call for abstracts deadline: March 31 2006.
Alertacall challenges councils on PTG funding and target numbers
March 17th, 2006Alertacall Ltd. has written to directors of adult social care challenging them to increase the amount of PTG funding they have available to spend on people with high-level telecare needs from £500 to £960 — and to do so whilst meeting half their target number of people benefiting from telecare. The press release doesn’t detail how they are to do this, except to say that Alertacall can ‘help release PTG funding… by providing low-cost telecare packages to councils which they could give to people to self-install. In doing so, councils could easily meet half their telecare population target and still have up to £960 available to spend on the rest.’
Comment: This appears to be the most interesting development on the UK telecare scene for some time. The Telecare Policy Collaborative wrestled with, to no real conclusion, the issue of whether it would be possible to get telecare into the general population of older people and also to people with identified care needs. If part of councils’ targets can be met at low cost, allowing more to be spent on people with identified community care needs, this could be a win-win for everyone including users, carers, councils and the more ‘traditional’ telecare suppliers. The downside of this development would be if councils met all their target number with low-cost packages and ignored the opportunity to redesign their care services to incorporate telecare.
Dr. Technology will see you now
March 17th, 2006Neat little blog entry on telemedicine contains simple message and links to further information. Read more.