Health Solutions

Our December 2012 report, Telecare and telehealth – a game changer for health and social care, provided a synopsis of the available evidence on the costs and benefits of telehealth and came out firmly in support of the NHS needing to use such technology in its interface with service users.

We concluded that technology assisted care provided an equitable way of enabling more people to live independently for longer, while supporting health and social care providers to work differently.  (View the infographic  used to introduce this report or view the video). 

In the past year there has been an unrelenting number of reports, often contradictory, and mostly derived from academic reviews of the Whole System Demonstrator (WSD) remote monitoring trial which have resulted in confusion as to the benefits or otherwise of telehealth.  Nevertheless, in publishing the refreshed Mandate to the NHS last week, the Government continued to champion a key objective in the 2012 Mandate, namely that by 2017 ‘significant progress will be made towards the 3 million people with long-term conditions being able to benefit from telehealth and telecare’. Clinicians and patients, however, appear to have other ideas. Indeed, a recent survey of Clinical Commissioning Groups (CCGs) suggested that delays and lack of interest from