Upon admission, municipality and hospital cooperate to create a coherent course of events to ensure that the patient gets the best possible care and treatment - before, during and after hospitalisation. In more complicated cases, a discharge planning conference (i.e. a meeting between the parties involved) at the end of the hospital stay may often be required to ensure an optimal transition from hospital to home and from hospital to municipality.

A discharge planning conference is often a resource and time-consuming exercise, including the often difficult part of gathering all relevant parties across organisations. Odense University Hospital's sub- departments situated at Kerteminde, Langeland, and Faaborg-Midtfyn Municipalities have been running a pilot project on telemedicine discharge planning conferences where the parties meet by means of video contact.

The Vision

Telemedicine discharge planning conferences mean saved administrative resources of the involved organisations. At the same time, the use of a video device can eliminate transportation time and thus shorten and streamline the discharge planning conference.

In Patient@home, the above project is followed up by putting the telemedicine discharge planning conferences into practical operation at Odense University Hospital in collaboration with a number of municipalities. The project's objective is to secure the start of this operation by initiating activities such as training of stakeholders and users, and formulating agreements on specific system workflows.