Royal Philips Electronics has announced that it will lead a new European Union (EU) funded research project aimed at improving care of heart patients through the development of telemonitoring solutions. The HeartCycle consortium will work to improve the quality of care for coronary heart disease and heart failure patients by developing systems for monitoring their condition at home and involving them in the daily management of their disease.
Public and private partners from 18 research, academic, industrial and medical organisations from nine different European countries and China will team up in the project. HeartCycle will run for four years and has a budget of approximately EUR 21 million, of which approximately EUR 14 million will be funded by the European Union.
Cardiovascular disease kills around 1.9 million people every year in the EU, with the associated annual health costs estimated at EUR 105 billion. Around half of these deaths occur in people who have previously had a heart attack, most of whom will develop heart failure before they die.
"The greatest challenge and opportunity for the management of long-term medical conditions is to help patients to help themselves," says Professor John Cleland MD, head of the department of cardiology at the University of Hull, past chairman of both the Working Group on Heart Failure of the European Society of Cardiology and of the British Society for Heart Failure and chief medical officer of the HeartCycle project. "Investing directly in people who need help, and not just in services that do things to or for them, makes sense in terms of improved care, greater affordability and the effective deployment of scarce nursing and medical resources."
