The future increase of chronic diseases justifies the development of telemedicine for following up patients outside of the hospital. However, current telemedicine applications are disease-specific whereas chronic diseases are often associated with comorbidities.

We show that the use of interoperability standards for telemedicine systems makes it possible to build a telemedicine platform (with several medical devices) that can be shared between several diseases workflows. To remotely follow up the patient's vital signs, health professionals need to access to the context description and the relevant background information. The implementation of a health data model that meets the needs of practitioners seems to be an appropriate solution to this problem.

To validate our architecture model of telemedicine application, we conducted various communication tests of vital signs to prove the interoperability of the patient system. The second experiment, we have developed one HL7 CDA document which collects several vital signs to a medical data exchange system among healthcare providers. This led us to propose a telemedicine application model, which is not only in conformity with the Health Information Systems Interoperability Framework (HIS-IF) of the “Agence des Systèmes d'Information Partagés de Santé” (ASIP), but also constitutes a proposed extension of this framework to the patient's home.

For the remote monitoring of patients with multiple chronic conditions, we developed a generic architecture that allows different telemedicine applications associated with specific diseases to share a common technical platform. This work was to propose at first, a health data model for the patient's vital signs, and, on the other hand second, a study of communication standards to achieve an interoperable system.