Many patients from our provinces (West Borneo) go abroad to threat their illness each year. A lot of them go to Kuching's hospital, because of the quality is better there. But the patients must spend a long journey to go there. It sometimes difficult for patients, example for the elderly.
It is a question with more than one answer. Telemedicine as a medicalcare method over the distance differs from one medial field or disease to another (mental care, heart maladies, wound care, consultations etc.) It is most probable that a usual face-to-face interventions include some information about a patient, which in case of remote intevention would probably not be the case. If remote intervention is video conferencing based? The caregiver may at least see the patient, provided a minimal quality of video service is in place. So the question could be refrased based on a kind of medical service would be needed and what is a modality of telemedicine possible in your area. If your ment a remote monitoring like temperature, BP, radiology data, cardilog, such data may be transffered over internet or phone lines. However, the data should be used be a doctor who has the information about the patient. So we come back to theneccessity of patient records to be stored and transfered when needed.Sorry if that is long, but the whole story is more complcated when we deal with a medical care.
Thank you for your answer sir Alexander. Maybe we must assest it case by case. Each patient and disease would be threated with different approach, so the devices available must be valid and reliable too to the parameter we want to analize.
Hello YOVAN,
I fully agree with Alexander's comments.
A case by case approach is to be considered in your case, as we can not refrain patients to seek for the best available medical care in their country.
I really appreciate all the inputs of Telemedecine, but it will never replace the ''face-to-face'' medical consultation if we consider the anthropological aspects of medical practice, that help the physician to perceive many other consideration, especially in SouthAsia, Africa...
We must also consider the emotional factors developped during the medical consultation.
To me, the construction of regional medical centers of excellence could offer a complementary opportunity to limit the flow of patients migration to the VIP healthcare facilities usually located in urban cities.
Hi all
I agree with the previous comments. Basically you have to verify the telemedicine application case by case. You may consider that some good results should be acquired in the followup process when you have already visited the patient and gave him the instruction on how to manage some remote technology.
You have also to consider some organisational points like how to manage the time the doctor in hospital dedicates to telemedicine.
In general the technology gives good answer to the communication needs and there are several proposals for specific disease remote monitoring.
The company Ksyos b.v. in the Netherlands is the largest health facility. It ONLY runs on telemedicine applications. ISO 13131 is the baseline for quality assurance of the care process. http://ksyos.co.uk/ . It does replace many of the routine care for which an MD is not required, but e.g. optetrician or nurse can perform various qualified tasks.
I also agree with Alexander, the answer may depend to particular clinical services you are dealing with, to be able to compare telemedicine with physical examination.
Biosensors do aid the respective doctors in forming their decisions along with the usual and necessary physical examination that is key to the correct identification of patients' ailments. Biosensors can thus assist but not replace the medical expertise and skills performed by the human medical doctor. As for telemedicine, high speed connections along with video conferences with multiple centers can be established at state of the art tertiary care centers or secondary hospitals. However, those hospitals that desperately need immediate and urgent help are the primary care hospitals as they are dealing with multiple cases on the spot. The expertise gathered through telemedicine must be disseminated to the entire world in order to help cure and diagnose as many diseases as possible.
There are different factors that impact the adoption of mHealth and remote monitoring services... improved patient access to care is certainly one of them... have a look at this systematic review about the factors impacting adoption for more insights Article Social, Organizational, and Technological Factors Impacting ...
- Badges
- Science topic
- Similar topics
- Medicine
- Public Health