About the ITV's Telemedicine and Telehealth projects

Imagine being in physical pain and having to spend hours in a car or plane because the nearest medical specialist is hundreds of miles away.

Telehealth is using technology to provide medical care over distance and it is improving healthcare for people everyday.
It allows physicians and health care specialists to diagnose and treat patients over distances – whether that span is across a street, a city, a region or an ocean. Telehealth can prevent uncomfortable delays, long waiting, high travel expenses and family separation by bringing specialized medical care directly to the people who need it. It is being practiced in rural areas, school districts, home-health settings, nursing homes, cruise ships, and even on the space missions.

ITV as a communication services company runs this technology in a practical way. Telemedicine is a technological aproach helping people to have better medical care. Telemedicine typically involves physicians using interactive video and/or store-and-forward consultations to treat patients. Interactive video allows medical specialists to directly communicate with their patients who are in another location, using television monitors and specially adapted equipment. Store-and-Forward techniques include physicians sending pictures, x-rays, ECG, EEG, drugs information and other patient information directly to the computer of a specialist. After reviewing that information, the specialist then sends the diagnosis back to the local doctor, who treats the patients and provides follow-up care.

Recently, the term telehealth has risen as a favorable expansion upon the word telemedicine; telehealth includes non-clinical services such as medical education or research.

How the telemedicine will impact the home healthcare industry?

Telehealth and teledoctor technlogies offer one of the few concrete and readily available ways to dramatically increase the efficiency of this sector of the healthcare industry. Increases in efficiency are crucial if we're going to avoid a breakdown in home health services over the next twenty years.

As baby boomers retire and begin to require these services in rapidly increasing quantities, it is highly unlikely that in-person visits will allow us to expand supply rapidly enough to meet the increasing demand. We are thus faced with two choices for the future:

(1) neglect telemedicine and face shortages of home healthcare services rendered at higher costs, or

(2) use telemedicine and preserve the people, delivering the level of care required without bankrupting the health care system. Anyone who doubts this need only ask themselves how easy it is to hire qualified home healthcare staff at the current levels of demand.

ITV runs a hardware and web-based telemedical system which is one of several new tools that use telecommunications technology -- computers, the Internet, VSAT links and interactive television -- to improve and expand home health care services for the elderly and others with chronic disease. "Telehomecare" or "home telehealth," as it is called, helps patients better manage their illness, thus avoiding costly emergency room visits, hospitalizations and dangerous complications.