The digital transformation of preventive telemedicine in France based on the use of connected wearable devices

摘要

France has a large and well-organized health-care system, however, before the restrictions caused by the COVID-19 pandemic, telemedicine was largely seen as a cost-effective method of making specialist skills available to socially isolated groups, and to patients who live in remote locations. Here, we present the findings of an exploratory study that examined what a preventative telemedicine system, based around a centralized platform and connected wearable devices, might look like. The data were collected during 2019, ahead of the pandemic, and include interviews with three key stakeholders: a doctor working in a hospital emergency room, the director of a service providing mobile resuscitation teams, and a user of a wearable device who discovered, through the device, that he had a serious cardiac pathology. The study uses the HINGE digital transformation model both as a methodology, and as a structure for presenting an outline of the key features of our proposed approach. We conclude by highlighting some of the benefits of our system, both in light of the context for the original study, and in the light of the COVID-19 pandemic that occurred afterward.