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.
