Good news for Telemedicine (not just Tele-Radiology)
It seems that Barco has received £1 million in grants from an economic development agency funded by the Scottish government, to help develop a new visualization product that would enable more radiologists to work from home. Barco has developed a software called Advanced Visualization Thin (AVT) that uses medical images obtained from CT, MRI and PET scanners to produce 3D images that radiologists can read from any laptop or desktop computer with a standard network connection or two to four Mbps broadband. (Full article here)
In another story – “Techs Speak up on Teleradiology” (Full article here), comments were gathered from technologist who are involved in utilise Tele-Radiology and I’d like to highlight some of them;
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“My experience with teleradiology has all been positive.”
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“I would agree that patient care is enhanced with the advent of teleradiology”
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“I guess there is a possibility of a technical glitch on the computer side of image transfer, but I did not experience such [problems]”
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“Gatekeeping went out the window with the advent of teleradiology. Emergency room physicians and clinicians used to have to medically justify after-hour exams.”
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I know how difficult it can be on local radiologists to be up all night and have to work the next day as well.”
Well, it seems that as with every technological implementation, there are its boon and bane, Healthcare Informatics is no exception. However, you analyse the ‘bane’, it would seem that those issues can be solved though effective management policies (e.g. give the people on-call a day off on the next day).
Tele-Radiology is born out of a need, its not something that engineers invented out of boredom, by staying focus to why one might need Tele-Radiology implemented (or why not), its than easier to work out the issues that arises from it (Change is constant and necessary for improvements).
With this, I’d like to 2 articles / whitepapers I wrote, I hope they will bring some insights on Tele-Radiology and its benefits.
Enjoy 🙂
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BinaryHealthCare (BNHC) 