The solution guarantees 24/7 health care and the home monitoring of health conditions via Bluetooth. First tests in Switzerland.

The task force of medical teleassistance experts that is part of the inter-ministerial initiative ‘Innova per l’Italia’ (Innovate for Italy) has selected the five best apps and technological solutions for the remote assistance of patients in isolation at home for suspected or confirmed contagion from Covid-19. Out of 504 proposals, Exprivia’s “eLifeCare Covid-19” app has been chosen, which embraced the call to action of the Ministry for Technological Innovation and Digitization.

The solution developed by Exprivia - the only ICT operator in Italy with SaaS qualification for solutions relating to radiodiagnostics and cloud telemedicine - is a certified medical device that remotely acquires and monitors the patient’s vital signs required to understand their state of health.

Through an app available on Android devices (and soon also on iOS) and with IoT medical devices, “eLifeCare” remotely monitors the patient by measuring body temperature, detecting oxygen saturation in the blood and heart rate using Bluetooth technology.

A 24/7 operations centre communicates with the patient at home in total safety using the various features offered by the “eLifeCare” platform (audio-video call or chat), which allow consulting the treatment plan. If the clinical situation is abnormal, an alert is sent to the operations centre with an indication of the actions to be taken. The operations centre can then contact the patient or indicated caregiver, activate a video call with the attending physician, or send a medical team. The doctor is alerted by the operations centre and has all the patient's clinical data available on his tablet or smartphone, such as examinations, prescriptions and vital parameters, and can activate a remote visit, prescribe examinations or treatments, also using the support of a healthcare operator present at the patient’s home, if necessary.

The implementation of “eLifeCare” has the objective of limiting the number of hospitalisations, seeking to avoid overloading hospital facilities with patients who do not have severe issues, and also easily manage health monitoring in the post-emergency phase. In addition, using the platform allows minimising the risk of health workers' infection, first and foremost family doctors who can provide remote assistance.

Over 100 patients with Covid-19 in quarantine in their homes in the Ticino Canton in Switzerland have already used the remote monitoring service, where thanks to collaboration with the start-up HospitHome, Cardiocentro Ticino , a state-of-the-art university clinic highly specialised in Cardiology, Cardiac Surgery and Cardioaenesthesia in Lugano, has identified “eLifeCare” as an effective support in dealing with the coronavirus emergency.

In Italy, Exprivia’s “eLifeCare” platform is already used for the home care of cardiac patients with severe arrhythmias and those with defibrillators in the Apulian Healthcare Service of the BAT province (Barletta-Andria-Trani).

“Joining the ‘Innova per l’Italia’ (Innovate for Italy) project is a further step towards making Italian telemedicine a cutting-edge reality, and the result achieved by eLifeCare, with the nomination as one of the best five solutions in Italy for combating Covid, rewards our work developing the solution over the last few years - explains Francesco Bellifemine, director of the Digital Factory E-Health and Smart City of Exprivia. “By implementing technologies already tested in other contexts, we are pleased to make our skills available to the National Healthcare System to support patients and healthcare personnel in remote assistance”.