Telehealth, by which patients and even doctors can consult specialists via online video, is not new to this country.
Parts of Victoria have been using it for five years.
It began with health administrators using video conferencing and has now progressed into doctor-to-patient and doctor-to-specialists, or patient-to-specialists consultations by online camera.
The Grampians in western Victoria, and Loddon Mallee in north and northwest Victoria, are probably the earliest adaptors, thanks in large part to Federal Government investment in technology.
The technology places cameras in doctors' surgeries, hospitals, aged-care centres and in specialists' rooms, so that instead of the patient or doctor having to travel for consultations, they merely dial in and connect up via video.
It's a bit like Skype, although no one wants their private medical concerns to be hacked into, so some areas are working to create links or private networks that are more secure and that can provide a clearer, more reliable sound and picture.
Speaking for myself, I like to see in person the doctor or specialist I'm visiting, but if the only way I could get access to them in an emergency was via online video, then I'd be all for it.
And how many of us have travelled to Melbourne for a check-up with a specialist who has a quick look at you, a brief chat and tells you to come back in six months, all in 15 minutes or less?
The take-up of this technology was supposed to have been helped along with incentives for doctors and specialists to consult this way.
Last year the Federal Government introduced a range of items under the national Medical Benefits Scheme.
Specialists and GPs can claim $6000 for their first telehealth consultation.
In this year's budget, handed down in May, that was cut back to $4800 (if done before July 1, 2013) and $3900 if before July 1, 2014.
The amount has to be claimed in two lots, the first after the first telehealth consultation and the second after the 10th.
The idea is to encourage medicos to adopt telehealth, rather than just try it.
In hospitals and aged-care services, its adoption has been piecemeal and has been largely dependent on whether locals can raise enough money to buy the equipment for their hospitals (experts suggest it can cost $10,000-$15,000 for the gear) and whether medicos adopt it and somebody pushes to set up the system.
At Adult Retrieval Victoria, director Dr Marcus Kennedy has been negotiating with and encouraging specialists and hospitals to adopt telehealth, partly as a tool to assist with deciding if critical care or deteriorating patients really need to be transferred away from their local hospital via a retrieval team.
So far, apart from ARV staff themselves, the Royal Victorian Eye and Ear Hospital and the Royal Children's Hospital are the only major hospitals regularly connected, making emergency and specialist medical staff available via telehealth.
Dr Kennedy, a former emergency department head at the Royal Melbourne Hospital, says the telehealth equipment at ARV allows him to check a patient via video link, allowing a more complete patient assessment than by phone alone.
"We can control the camera from here; we can zoom in and get very high acuity pictures. We can effectively be in the room, monitoring a patient the whole time. We can look at x-rays, cardiac monitors, head scans," he says.
Dr Tim Baker, an emergency medical specialist in southwest Victoria, says it was used successfully when a car crash patient with chest injuries arrived at Portland hospital recently.
The doctor in attendance, not a medical care specialist, was guided by ARV staff using cameras, to insert breathing tubes.
The journey towards this kind of future world, where we in rural areas get health and emergency care virtually, is well and truly under way.
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Autor(en)/Author(s): Genevieve Barlow
Quelle/Source: Weekly Times Now, 01.08.2012
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