A flexible home monitoring platform for patients affected by chronic heart failure directly integrated with the remote Hospital Information System

Today Chronic Heart Failure (CHF) represents one of leading cause of hospitalization among chronic disease, especially for elderly citizens, with a consequent considerable impact on patient quality of life, resources congestion and healthcare costs for the National Sanitary System. The current healthcare model is mostly in-hospital based and consists of periodic visits, but unfortunately it does not allow to promptly detect exacerbations resulting in a large number of re-hospitalization. Recently physicians and administrators identify telemonitoring systems as a strategy able to provide effective and cost efficient healthcare services for CHF patients, ensuring early diagnosis and treatments in case of necessity. This work presents a complete and integrated ICT solution to improve the management of chronic heart failure through the remote monitoring of vital signs at patient home, able to connect in-hospital care of acute syndrome with out-of-hospital follow-up. The proposed platform represents the patient's interface, acting as link between biomedical sensors and the data collection point at the Hospital Information System (HIS) in order to handle in transparent way the reception, analysis and forwarding of the main physiological parameters.