Case Study: an insurance company in Austria improves type 2 diabetes care with IBM telemedicine solution

An insurance company in Austria develops a telemedicine system

An insurance company in Austria faced the challenge of managing the rising incidence and high lifetime costs of type 2 diabetes among its members. They needed a way to shift from traditional reactive care to proactive, preventive treatment, which required close, near-real-time cooperation between physicians and patients to monitor compliance with medication and lifestyle changes. To address this, they partnered with vendor IBM to develop a telemedicine solution.

IBM implemented a system built on an IBM DB2 data server hosted on an IBM System z10 server, developed with IBM Rational and IBM WebSphere software. This solution integrated medical devices with cell phones to automatically collect and forward patient data to physicians, enabling rapid intervention when needed. The results were transformative, dramatically reducing healthcare costs by tens of millions of euros through prevention, improving patient health outcomes, and providing measurable ROI on treatment efficacy.