10/20/16 · Institutional

The UOC works with the Pan American Health Organization to successfully introduce telemedicine

The Pan American Health Organization (PAHO) has published a report, in collaboration with the UOC's Faculty of Health Sciences, which explains how eHealth services can be successfully introduced within healthcare contexts. This report forms part of the PAHO’s global eHealth strategy (2014-2019) for Latin American countries to optimize and improve health services with eHealth and mHealth (mobile health) applications, training for medical professionals and digital skills courses.

Francesc Saigí, director of the UOC's Telemedicine programme, explained how this report shows that the implementation of telemedicine provides the following improvements:

1. It promotes more comprehensive patient care. Telemedicine enables medical care staff to monitor patients with chronic and low-prevalence illnesses, thus reducing costs and improving quality of care. Telemedicine also allows users to receive preventive healthcare education, as well as allowing support in decision-making, and training for healthcare professionals.

2. It breaks down inequalities in access to healthcare resources. According to the report by PAHO, even among populations within the same country and healthcare system, there may be significant disparities in access to healthcare.

The use of telemedicine enables greater availability of care services irrespective of geographical location, including in rural areas or areas far from major hospitals. In this way, users save on the costs that would be associated with them travelling to major healthcare centres, allowing them to spend more on caring for their actual health.

In Saigí’s opinion, such inequality is very clearly visible in Spain. While residents in the city of Barcelona who suffer a stroke would be able to receive treatment at a tertiary care centre, with access to a consultant neurologist, with minimal delay, those living in other areas might need to be transferred over 70 km to reach a suitable hospital.

3. It reduces waiting times both for diagnostic tests and treatment by providing remote access from primary care centres to specialists in major hospitals. This system reduces the number of referrals to hospitals and avoids complications associated with delays, since it offers the possibility to obtain an accurate diagnosis and establish a suitable course of treatment within a few minutes. In this respect, the use of this technology can have a decisive impact on the health of the patient.

4. It provides the basis for new organizational structures and the building of networks. Telemedicine allows for a globality and interoperability among healthcare organizations. Despite resistance from within healthcare organizations due to the need to change working practices, and the difficulties of introducing organizational changes in care services, telemedicine enables the viability of new networked management and organizational models focused on continuity of care and patient oriented services.

5. It increases the efficiency of healthcare services by allowing healthcare resources over wide geographical areas to be coordinated and shared, and for services to be redesigned in order to optimize these resources. Saigí recommends that, when establishing a telemedicine service, the policies and strategies applied take into account the reality and the necessities of the specific context within which it occurs; the healthcare professionals affected are involved as stakeholders in the telemedicine projects; the technology introduced is user-friendly; scientific institutions and international organizations are involved in the process; the service is centred around the patient, and that legal, ethical, privacy and data protection standards are ensured.

6. It allows patients to be better informed and to take more responsibility regarding their illness. The introduction of telemedicine entails a change of culture, not just for the healthcare professionals involved, but also for the patients themselves. Remote care allows continuous monitoring of chronic patients within their own homes and enables the patient to take an active role in the management of their illness.

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