Virtual doctors to transform health care
Rural practitioners could access advice quickly, easily from other specialists
FOR PATIENTS as well as health practitioners, telemedicine or the providing of health care from a distance could greatly improve the level of care administered and received, particularly in rural areas.
It would give practitioners the ability to keep up to date with patients’ conditions outside a consultation and to get advice quickly and easily from other specialists.
Dr Rajeev Rao Eashwari, the director of eHealth at the KwaZulu-Natal Department of Health, said teleconsultations was a way of giving a second opinion to rural practitioners.
Using telemedicine “nurses practising in clinics can get advice from doctors and doctors in district hospitals can contact specialists”. He was speaking during discussions at the Healthcare Innovation Summit in Sandton last week.
The benefit of using telemedicine is that a patient would be more satisfied with their health-care experience because they would get immediate attention closer to their home or work.
It would also help alleviate issues of cost, large distances between patients and healthcare facilities and practitioners, lack of hospital beds, lim- ited resources at health-care facilities and staff shortages.
KZN, which was the only province with a directorate for eHealth had achieved level one of the seven levels of a telemedicine adoption model, which was to use technology, such as video conferencing, to support provider-to-provider consults and education.
A project the department had embarked on in association with the University of KZN used video conferencing, which could be linked to five venues simultaneously, for e-learning.
Teleradiology was being used in 12 hospitals and digitised images and reports were received in real time. In some areas, practitioners had been given computers and would connect to their seniors in urban hospitals between 12am and 2pm daily to get advice.
“We’re proposing a teleconsultation room in every hospi- tal,” said Eashwari.
Dr Robert Selepe, the executive clinical transformation officer at Tempilo Healthcare Group, said telemedicine would reduce the gap between health care and health, reducing hospitalisation.
“It has always been that the patient is sitting in front of you and when they’ve gone, they’ve disappeared. It’s important for us as health-care professionals to know what’s going on with our patients. We are treating millions with chronic conditions on the continent and we have no idea if our treatment is effective.
“Telemedicine will give us the cutting edge to get data, know if the treatment is working, adjust where we need to and understand populations. We’d be able to understand, am I winning this war, is it working.”
He said a system in the US saw doctors monitoring how their patients were doing and being rated on their performance.
Despite this, Elliot Sack, the director at eHealthGroup pointed out that doctors were reluctant to assimilate technology because they felt it would complicate their lives.
He said although the adoption of robotic technology globally was immense, South Africa remained reluctant.
“But telemedicine will help. It will increase functionality and reduce geographical dis- tances: a specialist can see a patient any time, anywhere, patients will connect with physicians via iPads or tablets.
Eashwari added: “With robotics, you could drive a robot to a patient. Robotic technology uses low bandwidth. We need to use technology due to our lack of human resource. We will make life easier by working smarter, not harder. We have to use technology, there’s no other way.”
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