[Telecare of patients with chronic obstructive airway diseases]

In view of the limited resources of health systems, telemedicine offers possibilities to supplement the known forms of care and supervision of patients and to intensify them on the side of patients as well as of medical care. Telemonitoring adds to but does not replace traditional home visits or the medical consultations. It is clearly structured, reproducible, and based on modern technology for communication between patients and doctors. In this way "flying visits" can be made to the patient with a high frequency which otherwise would never be possible for financial and practical reasons. They also serve for defining the right time for seeing the patient personally. In any case, regular transmissions of lung function values insure a close contact of COPD or asthma patients to specialized institutions without impairing or ignoring medical home care. Whether it will be possible to react more quickly to disease changes by telemetric means or whether other treatment advantages will result remains yet to be seen. Results, so far, are encouraging in such a way that the use of telemedical means in chronically ill patients will be further evaluated, also in other than pulmonary diseases.