New procedures and improvements in telemedical patient education could support self-management and self-care of this disease through tools such as access to electronic medical records, availability of constant information updates, and the development of a custom online community of patients. The system is also scalable for future functionality and enables the integration of both information and services, which could facilitate cooperation between different professionals, creating units to improve the care of HIV infection. Our platform provides a technical infrastructure that can simultaneously support telemedicine programmes for different chronic diseases and LY2109761 TGF-beta inhibitor patients with different risk levels. Indeed, platforms like the Virtual Hospital are destined to play a major role in facilitating new strategies for chronic care management, for example, by means of out-of-hospital follow-up, patient Y-27632 empowerment and care coordination, thereby improving patient care without an associated rise in costs. Several chronic diseases such as diabetes, congestive heart failure or chronic obstructive pulmonary disease have all used telemedicine with similar findings. The world��s population is aging. As we age, the incidence and prevalence of chronic illness continue to rise, and elderly patients typically have multiple chronic diseases. The HIV-infected population follows this same trend, but the fact that the rate of new HIV infections has remained stable since 1995 means the effect is worsened by the growing number of HIV-infected patients. The Hospital Clinic in Barcelona receives about 250 new HIV-infected patients each year. This increase, coupled with the drastic decrease in mortality due to current antiretroviral treatments, produces a significant annual increase in the care burden. Given the current situation facing not only patients but also health providers, it is important to consider the enormous potential of the internet. Here the Virtual Hospital has been shown to be a feasible and safe tool for providing multidisciplinary home care to chronic HIV patients. Although our study did not set out to measure the economics of study arms, to assist the reader��s understanding of the importance of the work to health care providers and to society as a whole in implementing the new system, we have made a qualitative statement about whether, for example, cost savings could be expected with the new system. The population of this study for clinical monitoring of their infection, regardless of belonging to a study arm or another, required to perform a blood test, a medical visit and eventually, antiretroviral treatment.