"VitalHealth enables personal health management throughout the entire healthcare chain"

Background

The idea for VitalHealth Software was born when several of the Founding Partners of VitaValley – a Dutch organization that aims to increase the adoption rate of IT technologies in the healthcare – decided to choose Disease Management as on of the core themes, specifically focusing on chronic diseases.

The choice to start with Diabetes Mellitus was obvious, as this affects a large number of people.
On a population of 16 million, the Netherlands counts roughly 600,000 diabetic patients, with an increase of 50,000 every year. The United States counts more than 18 million diabetic patients. The healthcare costs related to these cases are staggering; about 1.35 and 160 billion dollars for these two countries respectively. Without a doubt, the treatment of diabetes is far from optimal. Experts estimate that a more integrated and structured approach to treatment could yield a savings of up to 15-20%.

A better approach to treatment would require supporting software that is not currently available. Existing systems focus on the treatment of a single disease only, or perhaps just on the primary care aspects or the specialist treatments within hospitals. The patients themselves do not have access to these systems, which means there is no opportunity for patient self-management, prevention and education. Besides that, these existing systems are not equipped to support multi-disciplinary teams of physicians with delegation of tasks, a treatment process that is common practice. Typical to the medical world, most systems do not venture beyond supporting the administrative side of patient care, such as maintaining patient records and billing. Systems that truly support the medical professionals in establishing diagnosis and recommending treatments are a rare occurrence.



VitalHealth Software recognized significant opportunities to help improve the effectiveness and efficiency of treatment processes though the use of smarter software. In this respect GDMS will be unique in nature, thanks to a generic yet flexible architecture, and based on modern industry-standard technologies such as web services, model driven design and domain specific languages.

GDMS is being developed by VitalHealth Software and marketed in the United States of America and the Netherlands.