Congestive heart failure management in a home-care system through the CHS contact center

The Citizen Health System (CHS) is a European Commission (CEC) funded project in the field of IST for Health. It has developed a generic contact center, which can be used in the monitoring, treatment and management of chronically ill patients at home such as congestive heart failure (CHF) patients. The virtue of the CHS contact center is that using any type of communication and telematics technology it is able to provide timely and preventive prompting to the CHF patients, thus, achieving better disease management. In this paper, we present the quantitative and qualitative results through the use of the CHS contact center by CHF patients, looking at the prevention of complications, the quality of life of the involved patients, and the quality of the medical procedures and interventions used for the CHF disease management. It is shown through specific evidence that the use of the monitoring and interventions through the CHS contact center prevents worsening of the patients condition, something evidenced and supported basically by the sharp reduction in hospitalisation rates for the CHF patients that used the CHS home-care system.