E-health Dialysis: Tele-nephrology as a tool enabling homecare to become standard modality for dialysis care

Purpose and goal

The main purpose of this project was to prepare and submit an application for the Cooperation phase of the Challenge Driven Innovation. The goal were to build a consortium, to outline a proposal and to write full application to obtain funding to develop, implement and validate an integral telenephrology solution for supporting chronic kidney patients under home dialysis. The validation would be carry out in real scenarios through clinical pilots in at least 3 different hospitals with around 50 patients in total.

Results and expected effects

According to the goals the expected results were: a) a strong and complete consortium of partners able to execute the development and deployment of the e-health solution and carry out the implementation of the pilots and the analysis of the consequences . b) a complete and feasible proposal to execute the project c) The submission of a competitive project application Results a) and b) have been achieved and they will be value not only for this project but also for the future no doubt. The most important expected goal, c), submitting a competitive application has been also fulfilled.

Approach and implementation

The plan to execute this project was sound, it considered all the elements necessary to create a consortium and outline a proposal. Despite of a good start, the summer brought delays in all fronts that were not easy to overcome. Despite the low start, building the consortium after the summer looked promising, due to the good response from potential industrial partners. We found difficulties with the clinical partners for the pilot, Although the clinics were very interested to get the permission to join the consortium from the corresponding administrations, was slower than expected.