At the cutting edge of telemedicine

Telemedicine is something that we are hearing more and more about today, and for good reason.

Taken in its broadest sense, telemedicine refers to all the technology involved in medical applications when patient- and care-related information flows between personnel – whether surgeons, physicians, nurses, or administrative staff – across local hospital or wider networks. In terms of what it wants to achieve, telemedicine is about improving the performance of health care to give better care, and ensuring that care is made available and given precisely where it is needed.

Adding IT to the health care equation by itself does not necessarily bring benefits. Added intelligently, however, and as an integral part of a new concept and system, cutting-edge IT can drive cutting-edge telemedicine.

Success in this new field calls for expert knowledge and the vision to make use of the opportunities offered by new technologies to make new ways of working possible.

A successful new system can indeed bring valuable improvements in the quality of care people receive, cost efficiency, and clinical performance. Too often, however, the shiny new systems that have been rolled out around the world have failed to deliver on at least one of these parameters. Something seems to be missing, or seems to have been missed out.

It often comes down to benefits, or the lack of them, in unsuccessful projects. Adding IT to the health care equation does not necessarily, or automatically, bring benefits, as recent studies on the actual productivity benefits of new IT-based health care solutions have indicated.

Measuring benefits can be difficult, however, and subject to interpretation – which does not make things any easier.

A short, but varied history

Despite still being a young company, LifeIT has been involved in numerous development projects and has contributed to the birth of a number of successful products.

These include systems to package and transfer images, sound, and text to create new types of electronic patient archives, and a concept utilising GPS and mobile phones to assist emergency services and health care professionals.

Elderly people in need of help, for example, can send an SOS message using this latter system simply by pressing a button on their GPS-enabled mobile phone. A remote computer will then immediately display the location of the phone and log the time of the message, and alert assistance.

Up until now, the company has focused on developing local health care services, but its expertise is now beginning to reach a point where it can best be developed further by application to broader needs, both nationally and internationally.

Mobile technology represents an ideal platform for leveraging new types of telemedicine services.

Rolling out the technology

The company’s recent decision to fund a five-year professorship in telemedicine and health care IT at Tampere University of Technology reflects a desire on the part of LifeIT to address more of the challenges involved in applying new technology to true patient needs.

This is important, as the company believes that a significant part of the future of people’s wellbeing will lie in how successfully we are able to transfer the sophisticated monitoring technology we have become accustomed to in hospitals to less technical environments, such as the home, the work place, and leisure locations.

Ease of use and functionality will have to be increased significantly to make this kind of transfer feasible and practical. If this technology transfer can be handled intelligently, however, the benefits to the average man and woman in the street, in terms of monitoring their condition and anticipating potential health problems, will be considerable.