The country’s first virtual wards will be operational in a matter of weeks, Pulse+IT has learned. University Hospital Limerick and St Vincent’s University Hospital in Dublin will begin offering the service to patients in the coming weeks.
Initially the service will be offered to suitable patients who are admitted to either hospital with a respiratory or cardiac condition and are medically stable but require ongoing monitoring and care before they can be discharged.
Virtual wards allow patients to get hospital-level care at home. Research has shown that the model avoids hospital admissions, reducing costs and freeing up hospital beds. People on a virtual ward are cared for by the consultant-led team who cared for them in hospital.
Patients are reviewed daily by the clinical team as part of a virtual ward round. This may involve a home visit or take place via video. Wearables and other technologies are used to constantly monitor key clinical measures, and patients receive blood tests, medication or IV fluids.
The move follows a successful pilot of the virtual ward model at Letterkenny General Hospital from May to August 2022. In the proof-of-concept initiative, 15 patients with COPD who had required repeated hospital admission for COPD exacerbations.
In an effort to empower people to self-manage their illness and to avoid hospital admission, a bespoke platform that incorporated respiratory rate (RR) trends was designed and implemented in Co Donegal. This data was reviewed by an advanced nurse practitioner daily.
At the end of the pilot period, the data revealed that hospital avoidance was achieved in 100 per cent of the 18 exacerbations recorded in 10 participating patients.
The average cost per patient reduced from average €19,384 to €3,376, with a 96.7 per cent probability of being both cost saving and cost effective at a €45,000 willingness to pay threshold.
Several patient-reported measures also indicated improvement between admission and discharge, including self-management (increase of 29.1%), understanding of COPD (increase of 35.3%), and Quality Adjusted Life Years (QALY) (increase by 0.15 of a QALY).
The virtual ward model is one of several telehealth initiatives contained in the new national digital health strategy released by the Department of Health last week. These will include video consultation, remote patient monitoring, virtual wards, and secure channels of communication with healthcare professionals.
The HSE Telehealth Roadmap 2024-2027, launched in December 2023, promised to make funding processes for telehealth visible and available to all healthcare organisations and GPs.
This includes promoting available sources funding, such the Sláintecare Integration Innovation Fund, which has been established to test and evaluate innovative models of care, leveraging technology where possible, and providing proof-of-concept with a view to scaling up successful projects.
The current round of funding applications is focused on six specific areas:
- Improving access to services in acute hospital services and primary care services for children and young people
- Improving patient safety
- Quality improvement in GP chronic disease prescribing
- Integrated virtual case management of multi-morbid chronic disease patients
- Scheduled care pathways for the chronic disease programme
- Continuous professional development for nurses and midwives in the community.
