Technology is the best medicine
Imerja's Ian Jackson discusses how video as a service could be the answer to many health service challenges.
An ageing population. Tightening budgets. Too-long waiting times. Ever-growing pressure to do more with less. It is no secret that the healthcare sector in the UK is under immense pressure.
Newspaper headlines tend to focus on the role of personnel within the NHS, whether medical practitioners, support staff or researchers. This is understandably a favourite media topic, and is certainly a crucial element in building a long-term, sustainable health service. But has the ability of technology to drive efficiencies been neglected?
From stethoscopes to CAT scanners, technology has long played a critical role in delivering cutting-edge medicine. Exciting innovations in the past few years include using microchips to replicate human tissues, 3D printed biological materials and even digestible sensors that could potentially be swallowed and wirelessly transmit the inner workings of the body.
Next to these, telecommunications and videoconferencing technologies may seem somewhere old hat - and yet telemedicine may have the broadest applications of all when it comes to driving healthcare efficiencies.
High-definition videoconferencing removes the reliance for direct face-to-face contact in a huge range of medical settings, from routine check-ups to highly specialist interventions such as remote assessment of patients who have suffered acute strokes.
The key benefit of this kind of telemedicine is that it enables the spread of very limited resources across large geographical areas, the absolute essence of doing more with less. Videoconferencing removes the need for patient and practitioner to travel to each other, immediately saving time and money.
But it is not just about driving resource efficiencies. If a particular intervention takes place over video rather than face-to-face, appropriate medical action can be taken far quicker - so telemedicine drives efficiencies of care too. Knowing that expert care and advice is available immediately significantly reduces patient distress and aids the recovery process - leading to potentially fewer interventions further down the line. As such, telemedicine can actually reduce the severity of conditions and remove the need for long-term care in certain cases - it is, in effect, a medical intervention in itself.
Telemedicine could be of particular benefit in rural areas where patients are more likely to have to wait a long time for a practitioner to visit them at home, and in turn practitioners spend an inordinate amount of time on the road between patients. But even in entirely urban based NHS Trusts, the efficiency benefits are huge. Through telemedicine, high-quality care across an entire Trust area becomes far more accessible, and potentially life-saving rapid response services could be accessed far more quickly should patients get into difficulty.
Looking beyond the relationship between patients and healthcare professionals, high-quality videoconferencing can help to reduce the distance between other groups too. What about doctors and educators, or between different specialist facilities and multi-disciplinary teams spread across multiple sites, or even in different countries? Here, telemedicine is the clear enabler for quicker, clearer communication and information-sharing - something that is becoming increasingly important as patients are granted more freedoms to choose the facilities they wish to be treated in, and certain services are delivered from highly specialised centres of excellence.
As we watch A&E waiting times get worse (88 per cent of patients were treated within four hours in November 2015) and the population of elderly patients with complex medical needs get larger, it is vital that we take a holistic approach to healthcare efficiency. Telemedicine is the answer for improving the efficiency of our scarce healthcare resources, delivering high-quality care faster to patients, and providing better access to services over a wider area. With the added ability to quickly and securely share knowledge and information about a particular patient and their care delivery with other practitioners the wider adoption of telemedicine across the primary and secondary care environments can only help to improve treatment and outcomes, and relieve some of the pressure currently threatening the general delivery of services.
Ian Jackson is managing director of Imerja