Interest and usage among the target groups
All four pilot projects showed that there is interest in such new services among patients and health care professionals alike. For example, in the OnKontakt project, 85 patients used the Kaiku Health platform. Patients and healthcare workers rated the platform's usability highly, with 77% of patients responding that the IT solution helped them independently manage issues related to their treatment. On average, one patient responded to questionnaires on the Kaiku platform 20.7 times over six months, or 3.5 times per month. Based on the responses to the questionnaires, the severity level was determined for a total of 22,436 treatment-related side effects.
At the end of the Pre-visit project, a quarter of patients considered MinuDoc their most frequent channel for contacting the primary care center, and contacting by phone decreased. Nurses began to play a bigger role. In 2022, patients contacted MinuDoc 32,071 times, including completing 10,441 symptom questionnaires for new health problems. This averages to one contact per patient per year and 0.37 times for completing symptom questionnaires.
In the OTT project, 168 patients used a new digital health plan to monitor their health. In total, 168 patients sent 755 messages over 13 months. Patients received a response from the primary care center team on average in 4 hours and 31 minutes. Thanks to the remote service, the customer experience of intervention group patients improved, and at the end of the study, 43% more patients in the intervention group achieved their target blood pressure values compared to the control group. 91% of intervention group patients rated the health plan as helpful in achieving their desired results by the end of the study period.
In the psoriasis remote monitoring project, both patients and healthcare workers rated the user-friendliness of the application used in the highly. Enough patients (77.15%) used the remote monitoring solution, allowing healthcare workers to make decisions about treatment or referral based on remote monitoring information. Usage activity was also sufficient to assess the feasibility and impact of this project's service model compared to conventional treatment. 87% of the patients involved expressed satisfaction with the new service, and 85% would recommend or strongly recommend the service to others. 68% of patients participating in the project expressed a desire to continue remote monitoring, with 70% still under monitoring even after the end of the sample project monitoring period. The study found that patients' readiness to use remote monitoring may be influenced by healthcare workers' active involvement in patients' treatment journey, ongoing support, and encouragement, as both the desire and need for such were highlighted in both patient focus groups and feedback, as well as usage activity analysis regarding the healthcare institution's workflow processes.