• A total of 937 patients are being remotely monitored in Hospital Universitari Bellvitge and Hospital de la Santa Creu i Sant Pau, both in Cataluña.

• Results of the implementation will be presented publicly Q3 2022.

Barcelona, 21 March 2022.- H2020 funded PPI (Public Procurement for Innovation) project RITMOCORE has successfully implemented an integrated care model based on remote monitoring of patients with pacemakers suffering from bradycardia in Hospital Universitari de Bellvitge and Hospital de la Santa Creu i Sant Pau, where a total of 937 patients are currently part of the RITMOCORE programme.

The tenders, awarded in December 2020, constituted the first two outcome-based contracts in Spain for implantable pacemakers.

RITMOCORE’s model sets a shift from hospitals purchasing devices to purchasing services, where payments are outcome based and where services are supported by advanced ICT systems that enable digital transformation setups such as remote monitoring of patients with pacemakers.

The model takes advantage of these systems to help coordinate care by making the remote-monitoring data available to all clinicians involved in a patient’s care pathway, and to patients and their caregivers, reducing the need to contact specialists for routine visits and facilitating the transfer of follow-up activities towards primary care, increasing healthcare service efficiency. The model also empowers patients to assume greater responsibilities in their own care, paving the way towards the implementation of resource-efficient models of self-care.

In both Hospital de la Santa Creu i Sant Pau and Hospital Universitari Bellvitge, the contract has been awarded to Biotronik SE & Co. KG. In Hospital Universitari Bellvitge, the newly implemented Remote Monitoring Centre is currently remote-monitoring 521 patients and, since it was launched Q3 2021, has responded to more than 60 alerts that triggered medical or technical assistance (a high percentage of these were atrial fibrillation alerts, pioneering the remote detection of atrial fibrillations in Europe). In Hospital de la Santa Creu i Sant Pau, the same technology is currently remote-monitoring 464 patients, having triggered 36 alerts in 2021 and projecting a much larger figure for 2022. In both hospitals, the programme has made inroads towards coordinating the primary care of patients and empowering them to take a greater control of their clinical pathways.

The first results of the implementation will be presented in public forums in Q3 2022, but preliminary reports from Hospital Universitari de Bellvitge and Hospital de la Santa Creu i Sant Pau manifest a significant improvement in clinical outcomes and a majority of KPIs met well over 100% (for instance, in Hospital Universitari de Bellvitge, 99% of confirmed atrial fibrillations were detected by remote monitoring, when the objective was ≥ 80%), providing solid evidence of the sustainability of the model towards future scale-ups.

RITMOCORE is an H2020 funded PPI under gran agreement No 727796.