Prof. Alessandro Stecco
Professor of Radiology a Eastern Piedmont University (UPO), Novara, Italy
President of Piedmont Council Healthcare commission
Piedmont Region (Regione Piemonte) is a 4,5 million citizens Region of Italy in the North-West, near to France e Switzerland, North of Liguria, and West of Lombardy. More than 50% of the territory is represented by hills, mountains, and valleys, while half of the population lives in Turin and its urban metropolitan belt, the others more sparsely in the rest of the territory. The region is a very touristic place with Alps and big lakes, as historical and cultural towns and cities, with a great enological and gastronomic based economy and traditions. Piedmont is one of the 4 Italian regions with elder people, so with a high demand for socio-sanitary support and care: 22% of older population receives 5 or more drugs daily; 11% has 3 or more chronic pathologic conditions.
This combination of elder people and the Oro-geographical issues together actually is linking to another main issue regarding doctors shortage in the last years, making very cogent and mandatory the issue of granting to all the constitutional mandatory them of free and universal access to the public healthcare system
The main goals of the telemedicine improvement in Piedmonts are:
- integrate teleassistance/telemedicine in home-based care and rehabilitation, developed through participatory design and simulation instruments
- investigate different management solutions, leading to improved patient’s well-being and autonomy, and to better and more sustainable healthcare interventions
- reduce healthcare and social costs, shortening hospital stays, and strengthening the juridical and ethical acceptability of this model
- Improve the use of techniques A.I. based, for cost optimization with an increase in the quality of services
Since COVID Pandemic Piedmont led the other Regions in forcing a quicker development of a solid and structured digital health eco-system for patients and healthcare professionals, arriving to approve regional laws that recognize televisit and teleconsulting, as telemonitoring
Actually in Piedmont is operative a global digital cloud healthcare system called Electronic Health Fasciculus (Fascicolo Sanitario Elettronico) which encompasses 23 functions for citizens and is fully linked to all the Hospitals and Healthcare nodes of the Regional System, granting access to laboratory and imaging data, to vaccination certification, gluten-free dietary prescriptions, and so on.
Pharmacies are fully linked to the system and people can now go to retrieve prescripted drugs and therapy without showing the prescriptions that are now fully electronic and dematerialized
In many fields of Medicine are now fully operative activities of telemonitoring or wireless remote interrogations of devices, such as pacemakers, glucometers and many others.
It is now active for the last two years as a Regional Agency (Azienda Zero) that coordinates telemedicine projects and is going to tighten the links between Emergency Rooms from different Hospitals, and hospital images and data sets for fast consultation in urgency.
Piedmont, by means of Azienda Zero, is also starting also a project for regional consultation among hospitals for stroke cases, for decision-making of centralized or not patients seen in remote secondary or tertiary hospitals
The newer field of Digital Pathology is really emerging and main oncologic centers and hospitals are now using this platform for anatomic pathologic specimens collaborative archiving and analysis
In the AI Field, two main research consortiums constituted by the Piedmont Universities (UPO, UNITO and POLITO) are driving research and clinical applications on radiomics, radiologic imaging automatic detection, and many other fields
AI is providing clues to be also very effective in managing hospital complex organizations to optimize resources and costs
European Funds called in Italy PNRR are granting economic availability to complete the digital transformation of the regional and national health system, and Piedmont is going fast and steady to fulfill the temporal steps required to reach the expected time points.