The Information Technology Executives Club of Rome – CDTI, in the spirit of contributing with the skills and experience of its members in the development of the country, involving multidisciplinary professional such as doctors, researchers, entrepreneurs, professionals and IT executives, created an Health Working Group (HWG), which identified the Telemedicine as a fundamental theme for the development of E-Health, also analyzing its recently issued operational guidelines, to synthesize in a single document the information elements for the development of services and the rationalization of costs by the use of information technology.

The working group, considering that,

• Medical Care needs to address the challenges of aging and chronic disease and that the concept of health has evolved into the concept of well-being, and, as such, requesting improvement in quantity and quality of personalized services;
• the reorganization of the Medical Care has not yet included in a systemic way those innovative telematic services that would allow a rationalization and saving resources;
• The addresses of government and recent operational guidelines agreed by the Conference State – Regions and issued by the Ministry of Health, involve the expansion of the territory with a smaller number of hospitals more and more advanced, technologically advanced, dedicated to pathologies high complexity;

and in consideration that the intensive use of information technology and telecommunications (ICT) as key instruments to allow the sharing of information between the various sectors of health and social component without physical travel, the HWG decided to engage himself in the development of a white paper “Telemedicine: from saying to doing.”

This document, which was made public on the occasion of the CDTI September 16, 2014 Seminar in Rome, contains proposals for a concrete and competent support to the “government strategy” for the deployment of telemedicine services in the territory, recognized as an important tool for care and assistance in integration of existing health and social services, effective for cost reduction and increase of services, and also the engine of new jobs in the market.

After years of experimentation isolated, often undertaken voluntarily and dismissed before putting a system on a large scale, a number of national and international experiences have shown that the modern Telemedicine, if programmed in a timely manner in accordance with the more general strategies for improving the quality and efficiency of the health system, is now able to offer significant support to the actions of change in health care systems and proves sustainable in the medium to long term.

Source: Club Dirigenti Tecnologie dell’Informazione di Roma – www.cdti.org