Telemedicine from the first world

Here's an Washington Post article about a British couple who have set up their own charity to provide telemedicine around the world, based on just themselves, an assistant and a lot of energy. The Swinfen Charitable Trust sounds like a pretty amazing shoe-string operation. Based in England, it has links to the University of Virginia. It's apparent in this article that telemedicine is going to change the practice of medicine as the 21st century progresses.

Telemedicine, literally

Wired.com reports on a new strategy to get TB patients to take their medicine: free cell phone minutes.

While human interaction is still necessary because self-reporting isn't always reliable, allowing patients to text-message results from their urine tests - and get free minutes as a reward - apparently gets better participation during the six-month regimen.

More medical technology - robot-assisted surgery

Here's an interesting bit about robot surgery - which saves wear-and-tear on both the surgeon and the patient when everything goes right. In the Museum, we have a Satava collection devoted to collecting the groundbreaking medical technology mentioned in the article, and on display we have Penelope, a early attempt at a robot nurse.
Prepping Robots to Perform Surgery
By BARNABY J. FEDER
New York Times May 4, 2008
From knees to the heart, more operations are being performed by robots, under the guidance of surgeons.

Telemedicine of the Third Kind

This article talks about another type of telemedicine - one in which patients load their symptoms and treatment into an online database to aid research, and possibly themselves.

"Practicing Patients," by THOMAS GOETZ, NY Times Magazine March 23, 2008.
PatientsLikeMe, an Internet start-up, creates information-rich communities for the chronically ill. Is it the next step forward in medical science — or just a MySpace for the afflicted?

And speaking of telemedicine...

...today's Washington Times had a piece on teleradiology - "Outsourcing images," by Shelley Widhalm (March 20, 2008) that talks about some of the issues, ethical and practical, involved in the practice. It's a bit of a puff piece for an area business, but gets across the points one should think about.

My earlier post on telemedicine is here.

Telemedicine at its most basic

Telemedicine is one of those buzzwords these days, and if you've checked into a hospital for x-rays after say 7 pm, you may very well have participated in it. Radiology is all digital these days - no film anymore - and India with its quotient of well-trained doctors is wide awake at midnight on the US East coast.

But here's another, more personal example from the Washington Times. In The doctor's online 'office' from March 18, 2008 by Karen Goldberg Goff, you can read about Dr. Howard Stark's embrace of the Internet to make life and medicine easier for everyone involved. Up to and including, "I once had a patient who worked for the WorldBank who called me from the airport in Kazakhstan," he says. "He had an abdominal hernia and was
in tremendous pain. I talked him through pushing in his own hernia on the floor of the airport."

Now that's telemedicine.