telemedicine dialing long distance healthcare

Dialing Long-Distance for Health Care
, Mark Piehl, M.D., at WakeMed Health and Hospitals in Raleigh, N.C., make cell phones integral to their daily lives, using them to call Telemedicine makes care accessible when and where friends, send text messages, play games and download music. But for these children, mobile phones are more than entertainment. it’s needed–across state and national borders. They’re also the newest weapon in their fight against type 1 diabetes, which requires the kids to check their blood-sugar levels several times a day and inject themselves with insulin as needed. Outfitted with software developed by high-tech startup Confidant Inc., the phones used by Piehl’s patients receive blood-sugar readings wirelessly from a Bluetooth®-enabled glucose monitor. With the touch of a button, the kids send their data via Inc.’s wireless network to a computer in nearby Durham, where it can be reviewed by a nurse from Piehl’s team. Confidant’s system also sends text messages to patients, congratulating them for good blood-test results and regular testing or prodding them to improve. Some phones are programmed to alert health-care providers the instant a patient’s blood-sugar level enters the danger zone.
Adapts Easily Piehl, the medical director of WakeMed’s pediatric diabetes program, has been running a pilot test of Confidant’s system on 10 patients. “We don’t have enough numbers yet to prove long-term improvement in diabetes control,” he says. “But we have shown that kids like the system. It reminds them to check their sugars more frequently and does that with technology they’re already PHOTODISC/VEER using, so it adapts easily to their lifestyle.” Confidant’s cell-phone-based monitoring system is just one of many exciting new developments in telemedicine, which uses communications technology to track and treat patients. The >>
>> concept itself is hardly new: When your grandmother telephoned the family doctor to describe your mom’s fever, she was using telemedicine. A more advanced approach emerged in the 1960s, when the National Aeronautics and Space Administration first used radio signals to beam orbiting astronauts’ physiological data back to Earth. Today, with the advent of high-speed broadband communications, telemedicine is becoming a part of everyday medical practice. Some people suffering from congestive heart failure equip their homes with remote monitoring systems that periodically transmit vital data, such as heart rate and weight, for expert evaluation. Elsewhere, MRI technicians in one JERRY TOBIN/CORBIS city forward digital images to radiologists in another by high-speed fiber-optic networks, Telemedicine is allowing patients with pediatric diabetes to receive reminders via text messages to check their blood-sugar levels. a process that can take less time than a clerk carrying images from one floor of a medical center to another. And some hospitals teleconference on those same high-speed consistent treatment of injuries and illnesses; and by allowing many patients to be treated In the past decade, physicians have been practicing long-distance surgery. One urolo- networks to let nurses at distant locations participate in grand rounds, an important means of continuing education. at home rather than in a hospital. A recent study at Stony Brook University in New York gist at Johns Hopkins School of Medicine in Baltimore has performed surgeries as far Great Benefits found that telemedicine cut the costs of managing congestive heart failure by 41%. It away as Thailand and Singapore by directing a remote-controlled robotic arm via com- Telemedicine is growing because its benefits are too great to be ignored. It gives patients reduced the number of physician office visits by 43%, emergency room visits by 33% and puter. Here are some more recent uses of the technology. access to specialists and specialized services too far away for face-to-face visits. It hospital visits by 29%.
• INTEGRIS Health Inc., Oklahoma’s largest not-for-profit health organization, uses allows providers to monitor and respond to patients’ key health indicators faster and “All segments of the health-care profession are saying that this is the way health care videoconferencing to deliver speech pathology services in real time to learning-disabled more consistently. Finally, it saves money— by eliminating the need for patient and has to go,” notes Bjorn Nordwall, Confidant’s president and CEO. Indeed, the growth children. physician travel; by facilitating earlier, more opportunities for telemedicine are vast.
• This year INTEGRIS is launching a tele- neurology program in which neurologists in “All segments of health-care professionals are saying this is Oklahoma City consult with other doctors and their patients in medically underserved parts of the state. “The neurologist will be able to see patients in real time while they are with the way health care has to go.” their physicians, will have access to their >> tive director of the American Telemedicine Association. He notes, for example, that Nike has already partnered with Apple to produce a running shoe that wirelessly transmits data—about the time of a run, the distance covered and the calories burned—to the runner’s iPod.
It’s not far-fetched to think that similar technology could be used to forward vital data to a health-care professional treating someone for obesity, say, or for other conditions for which physical exercise is part of the recovery plan. And telemedicine will hardly be limited to the U.S. “The biggest change we’ve been seeing in the last few years is the push to use Fast transfer of digital images from CT scans and MRIs make it possible for patients to receive equal care at any location. telemedicine internationally,” says Steve Normandin, president of AMD Telemedicine, a seller of telemedicine products and an partner in providing telemedicine solutions. Eye experts at Vanderbilt >> U n i v e r s i t y ’ s O p h t h a l m i c Imaging Center, for example, brain CT scans and will be able to advise them remotely on a course of treatment,” explains rehabilitation psychologist Pamela Forducey, who is director of neuroscience and telehealth for INTEGRIS. are launching a program to screen digital photographs SMC IMAGES/GETTY IMAGES of Peruvian patients’ eyes for early signs of diabetic reti-
• The University of Arkansas Medical Sciences (UAMS) is reducing the infant mortality rate and improving the health of low-birth-weight nopathy, a common cause of blindness in the region. infants through an array of telemedicine programs that make UAMS health-care professionals accessible to 40 rural medical facilities. For Telemedicine programs make it possible for example, UAMS provides pregnancy consultation to high-risk patients through two-way audio and video interaction and access to real-time “Patients love telemedicine,” Linkous notes. “Survey after women at rural medical facilities to receive ultrasonic images of fetuses—much of it enabled by high-speed telecommunications technology. survey tells us that. Ultimately, receiving care via telemedicine pregnancy consultations from doctors at city won’t be considered special. It will just be integrated into
• At the Long Island Jewish Medical Center in New York, physicians are conducting hospital rounds while in their offices using robots to interact hospitals. the day-to-day activities of a doctor.” Normandin adds: “The with their patients. The five-foot-tall robots provide live video and audio feeds so doctors and their patients can see and hear one another. technology works.” For anyone who’s ever wished for faster Other applications are just over the horizon, and increasingly, they will be marketed directly to consumers, predicts Jonathan Linkous, execu- and simpler access to health care, that’s refreshing news.•
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