About Telemedicine and Telehealth

Imagine being in physical pain and having to spend hours in a car or plane because the nearest medical specialist is hundreds of miles away.

Telehealth is using technology to provide medical care over distance and it is improving healthcare for people everyday.

It allows physicians and health care specialists to diagnose and treat patients over distances – whether that span is across a street, a city, a region or an ocean. Telehealth can prevent uncomfortable delays, high travel expenses and family separation by bringing specialized medical care directly to the people who need it. It is being practiced in rural areas, school districts, home-health settings, nursing homes, cruise ships, and on NASA space missions.

Telemedicine typically involves physicians using interactive video and/or store-and-forward consultations to treat patients. Interactive video allows medical specialists to directly communicate with their patients who are in another location, using television monitors and specially adapted equipment. Store-and-Forward techniques include physicians sending pictures, x-rays, and other patient information directly to the computer of a specialist. After reviewing that information, the specialist then sends the diagnosis back to the local doctor, who treats the patients and provides follow-up care.

Recently, the term telehealth has risen as a favorable expansion upon the word telemedicine; telehealth includes non-clinical services such as medical education or research.

Telehealth is a topic that you'll be hearing more about in the future. The following are valuable resources for getting aquatinted with the field of telehealth:

What is Telemedicine

A well written article by Nancy Brown MLS, of the Telemedicine Research Center, that is an excellent introduction to telehealth.

Telemedicine Service Provider Develops Telecare Based Same Day Breast Cancer Diagnosis

UltraClinics, a telemedicine application service provider company based in Tucson, Arizona, and a spin-off company of the University of Arizona, has developed a process that drastically reduces the time it takes for breast care. During a single breast clinic visit, a woman can have a breast biopsy performed, receive a written laboratory report, and meet with a specialist by video-conferencing for breast cancer treatment planning, all in a single day. Previously, this multi-step process took anywhere from a week to over a month in many health care systems.

With the UltraClinics patent-pending process, the on-site biopsy and tissue processing are completed in a few hours. The biopsy glass slides are electronically scanned into digital image files using a DMetrix virtual slide scanner. A telepathologist at a service center, which can be located at any location with secure Internet access, examines the virtual slides at a computer workstation and immediately generates a diagnosis. If the diagnosis is cancer, the woman consults with a breast cancer specialist by video conferencing for treatment planning. Same day second opinions will be available from a panel of expert specialists using telepathology.

“The UltraClinics. process eliminates the agony women currently experience having to wait for a written laboratory report after having a biopsy and, if necessary, waiting to see a surgeon or oncologist,” according to Ronald S. Weinstein, M.D., Chairman of UltraClinics. “UltraClinics facilities can do it in a single day clinical visit,” said Weinstein. The UltraClinics process was implemented at University Physician Hospital in Tucson in 2005. “Patients have been more than pleased with the convenience and accuracy of the UltraClinics process,” according to Gail Barker, Ph.D., President of UltraClinics. “We envision the creation of a national UltraClinics service network. Timeliness of service should become an important measure of quality in health care,” said Barker.

“The UltraClinics process can make same-day breast care available to hundreds of thousands of women,” according to Weinstein, who is also founding Director of the national award-winning Arizona Telemedicine Program and Professor and Head of the Department of Pathology at the University of Arizona College of Medicine in Tucson, Arizona. Since 2001, the Arizona Telemedicine Program has hosted a highly regarded rapid digital telemammography service that has benefited thousands of women in rural Arizona residing up to 400 miles from the College of Medicine. These patients receive their written digital mammography reports in less than 90 minutes, before they leave their local imaging centre. The Arizona Telemedicine Program has also provided thousands of telepathology second opinion consultations for patients at small hospitals. Clinical studies have shown that the diagnostic accuracy is excellent.

In 1998, the Arizona Telemedicine Program’s senior management team established the first telehealth application service provider (ASP) organization, in the public sector. Currently, 55 independent health care organizations pay annual membership fees and use the Arizona Telemedicine Program ASP’s broad range of customized services. Over 250,000 patients have received telehealth services over the Arizona Telemedicine Program network. The same senior management team has now founded UltraClinics which takes the telehealth ASP business model into the private sector for the first time.

(Source: Wireless Healthcare, January 26, 2006)

New Project Uses Telemedicine To Reduce Hospital Stays

According to an article published CNET News, a British telemedicine project has halved the time patients spend in the hospital by enabling doctors to monitor their condition remotely. Carlisle Housing Association and the Carlisle and District Primary Care Trust wanted to reduce the length of hospital stays for patients and increase the independence of patients by giving them more information about their condition. Using the system to manage chronic respiratory diseases, doctors in Carlisle have managed to reduce hospital stays for some patients from 10 days to 5.5 days.

The project involves giving telemedicine monitors to patients, thus allowing them to measure their own temperature, heart rate, breathing rate, electrocardiogram and blood pressure. These results are sent via a phone line to a secure server, where they are saved as an electronic patient record, which can then be accessed by doctors or nurses.

The system can monitor diseases such as chronic obstructive pulmonary disease, which currently costs the United Kingdom’s National Health Service about $1.44 billion (818 million pounds) per year.