From the mHealthNews archive
Telemedicine is generally thought of as a technique for bringing medical care to very remote areas, far from medical centers. But as tablets and bandwidth come down in price, the potential to deliver care in urban environments will soon have appeal.
Ryan Spaulding, PhD, director of the Center for Telemedicine & Telehealth at the University of Kansas Medical Center, has been working with feeding tube patients who are prone to complications and infections, teaching them to use tablet video conferencing as a substitute for hospital visits.
Most of Spaulding’s earlier work involved the study of video use in hospital and clinical settings, but with the rapid rise of tablets he’s turned his attention to using iPads with secure video conferencing programs to allow specific patient populations to be treated at home. One of his projects involves studying the opportunity to treat patients who are permanently tethered to feeding tubes.
Spaulding will share some of his findings at the HIMSS Media mHealth Summit, taking place Dec. 8-11 at the Gaylord National Resort and Convention Center outside Washington D.C., as part of the session titled Creating a Wireless Infrastructure.
“So far, most of the momentum with mHealth has been around its capacity for gathering data, but we’re taking it to a much more interactive level,” he said.
Spaulding believes telemedicine has potential for a number of patient populations, such as those with ALS, or Lou Gehrig’s Disease, as well as a range of mental health conditions.
As Spaulding sees it, “a lot of telemedicine will move into the home,” but that move will bring its own technical issues, including the need to make video data as encrypted and HIPAA-compliant as other, more “static” forms of data.
One of the potential limitations of video-based telemedicine, Spaulding said, is the fact that a user must have access to robust levels of bandwidth. “Rural areas may not have adequate service for this kind of service,” he said.
Liability concerns are usually low in telemedicine, he said, as sitautions that appear to be more serious are usually referred to a clinic.
More information on Spaulding’s presentation can be found at http://www.mhealthsummit.org/program-details/overview.
