Telemedicine & eHealth Section

Aims

• To encourage the use of telehealth and telemedicine to deliver improved patient outcomes, more efficiently
• To disseminate good practice and establish standards
• To pioneer the teaching of telemedicine and telehealth to clinicians

Members include

Anyone with an interest in the activities of the section.

Definition and description

The following are the Department of Health's definitions of the various terms used in this topic area:

• Telecare – service user to responder: environmental monitoring such as fire, flood, fit and falls in order to ensure appropriate responses
• Telehealth – patient to clinician: vital signs and general condition monitoring such as blood pressure, weight, mental & physical state as an aid to treatment of congestive heart failure
• Telemedicine – clinician to clinician: seeking expert advice such as a GP consulting a dermatologist
• eHealth – all the above

Telehealth is used for the remote monitoring of an increasing range of conditions. Originally COPD and congestive heart failure were considered most appropriate as the tariff for unplanned hospitalisation is high compared to the cost of using remote monitoring and, particularly for COPD, forecasting of exacerbation likelihood is relatively easy.

However it is now being used for a far wider range of conditions such as diabetes (to give improved control of blood glucose levels), asthma, cystic fibrosis, hypertension, stroke recovery/therapy, early discharge and palliative care, to name but a few. Telemedicine is particularly attractive either where there is a small remote community that cannot justify a specialist service, such as many of the islands and remoter parts of Scotland or where there are relatively few specialists and advice needs to be given fast, such as for the administering of clot-busting drugs immediately following a stroke.

Georg Brox and Charles Lowe have put together the following document to describe how all the various health coding structures fit together to enable telehealth equipment to talk to other equipment and to people without confusion. Click here for more information [PDF 40k].

Annual conference

We hold an annual conference in late autumn which is attended by practitioners and researchers from across the world. Click here for more information.