Seven out of 10 hospital beds across Europe are occupied by people with chronic long-term conditions. The EU funded CONNECARE project aims at developing, deploying and evaluating a novel smart, adaptive integrated care system for chronic care management.
Improved self-management and Quality of Life
The tools will monitor patients’ activities and status. This should then empower patients, providing them with recommendations to self-manage their condition, resulting in substantial improvements in their Quality of Life.
Asthma and COPD patients benefit from improved self-management
At EFA, we welcome the CONNECARE projects’ ambitions. Our new “Active Patients ACCESS Care” report shows that asthma and COPD patients rely too often on healthcare professionals, hospitals and emergency rooms.
Furthermore, the opportunity of increasing patients’ capacity over their disease and life through empowerment is low. Improved self-management as aimed in the CONNECARE project could indeed increase patients’ ability to manage their disease and improve Quality of Live.
Patient-centered vs. Patient-involving
New data from our report also states that there could be done more on involving patients in their care. Overall, patients are not involved enough in decision-making over their treatments.
CONNECARE describes itself as a patient-centered initiative. Yet, we would be happy to see patients not only being considered but also actively involved in the development process of the this and any other project.
More information on the CONNECARE project can be found here.