During our recent cold snap in March 2018, Birmingham Community Healthcare reported that volunteer drivers of 4x4 vehicles helped community teams beat the freeze by taking healthcare staff to over 40 visits and ferrying them to and from work.
It’s always humbling to see the human spirit is alive and well in our communities. We even experienced the bordering on Baltic winds first-hand at our headquarters in Birmingham, with colleagues struggling to get to work. However, as climate change progressively wreaks more havoc on our weather, with more powerful storms fuelled by rising ocean temperatures and snow showing up in the south-west of England in Spring, it’s going to take more than volunteer groups to keep our healthcare system going.
Just as we use videoconferencing to cut down on business travel and make better use of people’s time, in my view, telemedicine will play an increasing role in our healthcare system, particularly during the winter months (of which there seem to be six each year now) when our mobility can be scuppered.
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Whilst telemedicine was originally regarded as a solution for countries covering large geographical areas, such as Australia or in developing countries where infrastructure can be unreliable and unpredictable, increasingly it’s evident that telemedicine has a role to play in the UK, particularly as our climate becomes increasingly volatile.
We’ve been involved in telemedicine for some years now through our provision of the Cumbria and Lancashire Telestroke Network through our partner, Virgin Media Business. This is an out-of-hours stroke thrombolysis (‘clot-busting’) service, which ensures that anyone from the area’s population of 2.2 million can benefit from treatment to reduce the likelihood of disability or death resulting from a stroke.
The network remotely connects a team of 15 specialist Stroke Consultants who can provide advice from their homes to eight hospital sites. Each consultant has a secure broadband connection to a video-enabled Telecart which is placed at a patient’s bedside.
The Telecart enables a two-way consultation, so that the stroke specialist can see and hear the patient, view CAT scans and recommend treatment. With strokes being the 4th most common cause of death and the most common cause of permanent disability, the quicker that surgical intervention can take place, the better the outcome for the patient. Telestroke is an example of IT being used to save lives.
As an IT professional you might be thinking “But it’s just video telephony isn’t it?” Actually, the answer is no. A Telecart is a bespoke device designed for use in hospitals – you can’t just hand the patient a smartphone with Skype. The service has to be 100% reliable, with no possibility of a call dropping during a consultation. The resolution has to be HD, so that the stroke specialist can see and assess the patient. The camera in the hospital needs to be remotely controllable, enabling the specialist to examine the patient as if they were in the same room.
Getting telemedicine right involves engagement between the IT managed services provider and the healthcare specialists. Our pre-sales specialists are actively engaged with healthcare professionals throughout the UK, working on the next generation of telemedicine solutions.