Task type: industrial research

Professional management: Semmelweis University

Participating consortium members:

• Answare Kft.
• Bay Zoltán AKK
• HumanSoft Kft.
• Semmelweis University
• ThorMed Kft.

In order to minimize losses resulting from unnecessary medical treatment, as well as to maximize health gain, more and more healthcare institutions apply up-to-date management systems. Medical expertise has embodied in institutional protocols significantly decreasing institutional losses. This opened a new path for foregrounding the quality elements and the professional, legal, and financial accountability of medical treatment. Beside the doctor and nurse providing treatment, the role of the manager also gained ground, and public organizations protecting patients' rights became more powerful as treatment, its planning and implementation became more transparent.

In 1999, the integrated care coordination system was introduced on an experimental basis in Hungary, in which one fifth of the country's population takes part today. The new health insurance law provides extensive rights for the health insurance funds to be established in order for them to become treatment organizers. In this policy environment god protocols are an urgent need, because without them treatment is not manageable.

There are several requirements related to these protocols:

• They should be based on the best professional practices,
• reflect the latest results of medical sciences, that form part of a medical science based on evidences,
• be capable of renewal, since medicine is in constant change, and
• describe the whole environment of intervention (often logistic descriptions and norms entail the greatest challenge).

Priority areas of the project:

• Gynaecology
• Obstetrics
• Pulmonology
• Stroke-ology (Neurology – Stroke treatment, rehabilitation of stroke patients)

Among the medical protocols the followings were developed:

• Asthma diagnosis with the help of telemedicine;
• Asthma care with the help of telemedicine;
• Support for stroke rehabilitation with the help of telemedicine.