Teleneurology: Telemedicine workstations to secure care in rural areas

The “TeleNeurological Outpatient Care” project, or Teneam for short, aims to improve neurological care in rural areas. Around 200 GP practices are initially participating in the project, which will receive telemedical workstations that can be operated independently of the existing practice network. This includes a computer with its network connection and a high-resolution camera with zoom and pan functions for secure and stable communication.

“Many neurological diseases increase with age, and at the same time, practice succession in sparsely populated areas is becoming increasingly difficult. […] At the interface between general practitioners and specialized medical specialists, it will be able to significantly improve neurological care in Brandenburg in the future,” said Brandenburg's Minister of Health Britta Müller at the opening of the project. According to the Federal Joint Committee (G-BA), the highest self-governing body in the German healthcare system, “only 1.5 neurology specialists per 1,000,000 inhabitants were available in the rural districts of Mecklenburg-Vorpommern and Brandenburg in 2020.”

The video tower on which the technology is mounted can be flexibly positioned within the practice to assess neurologically relevant symptoms such as facial expressions, motor skills, or movement restrictions. If required, qualified medical staff can also support the consultation on site, as is the case with numerous other telemedicine projects. For follow-up appointments, patients will be able to take part in telemedical consultations from home via a secure connection. The telemedicine technology comes from Meytec GmbH.

The telemedicine consultations will be supervised by specialists from Charité, Greifswald University Hospital, the Medical University of Lausitz, and specialist neurological practices in Brandenburg and Mecklenburg-Western Pomerania, among others. This enables GPs to examine their patients on site and immediately obtain an initial teleneurological assessment and treatment recommendation. The project aims to enable the early diagnosis of neurological diseases as well as to ensure the continuous care of chronically ill patients.

“Medicine of the Future”

“The GPs identify neurological symptoms at an early stage, offer an initial teleneurological examination directly in the practice, and then support the patients in close coordination with specialist colleagues and university clinics. In this way, supply bottlenecks in rural regions are resolved efficiently, reliably, and in a highly qualified manner. This is what the medicine of the future looks like,” says Müller.

The project is being funded over a period of 45 months with a total of 8.4 million euros from the G-BA's Innovation Fund. In addition to the Professional Association of German Neurologists and the Brandenburg Association of Statutory Health Insurance Physicians, numerous health insurance companies such as AOK Nordost, Barmer, DAK, and Knappschaft are supporting the project. The Technical University of Munich and the Charité want to evaluate Teneam via a randomized study with 8,000 patients.

(mack)