The CHRONIC system is a turn key, highly configurable, solution to solve the communication problems and needs, present and future, of the CHRONIC patient home care and follow up.

The CHRONIC solution relies on the perceived need to keep patients out of the hospital, while improving their care and outcomes. It amounts to increased "home hospitalization", and relies heavily on home monitoring systems.

But until the CHRONIC solutions concept, most of them required property of expensive equipment, tying the hospital to the provider, for good or bad.

The CHRONIC solution is based on

1. Hospital side of the CHRONIC solution:

The Care Management Center, an automatized communications solution that integrates into a comprehensive hard and software package the management and follow up of the patients under the scheme, allowing automated call answer and forwarding, bi-directional communications, integration of Hospital and home care through clinical history look up.

The user has an ample and upgradeable choice of communication means, ranging from plain PSTN, to satellite TV, and an open architecture that will allow to customize the CMC for special needs or for future developments.

Interaction between the CMC personnel and the patient at home also has been designed with an open design to allow the user the freedom of choice between the most advanced technologies available today, including Internet, direct videoconferencing through point to point, multicast and broadcast connectivity.

2. Patient side of the CHRONIC solution:

The home hub is the second part of the CHRONIC solution, and is a novel and central piece of it.

Through the home hub the user can attach any monitoring and communications device to the CHRONIC system. Its main function is to serve as a bridge between the existing and to be monitoring devices and the transmission layer of the system, with a standardized protocol, through the chosen communication channel.

The home hub also serves as a receiving station for the monitoring devices at the patients home, allowing, through the use of state of the art "bluetooh" communications protocol, albeit been able to accept any other actual standard protocol on user demand, through RF, direct RS-232, or any other, allowing for monitoring liberty through the household, for any monitoring device.

As the home hub also acts as an interface for the communications devices provided by the CHRONIC system, this can be tailored to be activated easily through it, and, if needed, flattening the learning curve and reducing the training required for the effective use of the system by patients and their families.

Multiple channels of communication are available to the user, to pick up the one that best suites him: from simple videoconferencing through PSTN, to advanced web communications, through digital TV networks and new technologies as WAP, the choice is with the user, allowing him to adapt the CHRONIC solution to the available networks at his area of actuation.