Doctors already involved in Australia's embryonic telemedicine sector, which allows patients to consult specialists hundreds or thousands of kilometres away, say the Government's plans to build a $43 billion national fibre-optic network is a good first step to encourage further roll-out of such hi-tech services.
But they say the full potential of telemedicine will only be realised when governments make it easier. Currently, only face-to-face consultations qualify for Medicare rebates, a disincentive for GPs and other private doctors to get involved.
Mark Coulthard, a paediatric intensive care specialist at Brisbane's Royal Children's Hospital, often participates in long-distance consultations using equipment that allows two-way communication with a studio set up in regional towns.
Instead of travelling to the state capital for a specialist consultation, patients travel to the studio in their town, where the specialist can see and hear them, and see their scans and other information.
Coulthard says once complete, the planned national fibre-optic network would allow doctors to devise "creative ways of delivering health services, and also directly into the home". "It will give us a mechanism to make headway in areas that are normally difficult to reach," he says.
But educating staff in how to use the new systems would also be vital. While telemedicine consultations between Brisbane and Mackay were a regular event, similar equipment in nearby Rockhampton was underused because staff there were undertrained and uncomfortable with using it.
Anthony Smith, deputy director of the Centre for Online Health at the University of Queensland, says the proposed new infrastructure is "an important piece of the puzzle, but not the most important piece". "It's really important that to have telemedicine accepted as a mainstream service, that it's funded appropriately," he says.
Marianne Vonau, executive director of critical care at the Royal Brisbane and Women's Hospital, and the first Australian-trained female neurosurgeon, conducted a telemedicine clinic in Brisbane on Tuesday in which she reviewed the progress of a four-year-old child in Mackay.
The child, Grace Druery, had had a shunt implanted in her head to drain fluid that had built up in her skull due to a congenital condition. Without the telemedicine facility, Grace and her mother Leanne would have had to fly the 800km from Mackay to Brisbane.
"I can see great need for it (wider use of telemedicine)," Vonau says.
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Autor(en)/Author(s): Adam Cresswel
Quelle/Source: The Australian, 11.04.2009
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