A new report shows how telemedicine is already helping physicians deliver patient-centred healthcare without geographic barriers

The challenge of an ageing population to health care systems on both sides of the Atlantic is well known. Guaranteeing the delivery of cost-efficient quality care for the increasing number of chronically ill patients therefore requires both innovative and sustainable solutions like telemedicine – the delivery of concrete health and social care at distance.

While over the past years sophisticated eHealth infrastructures with electronic health cards, electronic transmission of prescriptions and highly secure networks have been the focal point of the use of information and communication technologies (ICT) in healthcare - they alone hardly present the eHealth killer-applications able to answer to today’s health and social demands and alleviate growing burden of the healthcare workforce.

Instead, the many innovative, patient-centred telemedicine services already being delivered both in Europe and the United States have far more potential to do so, even though they do not get the same media attention as the applications of technology-driven, larger eHealth infrastructures.

Tangible benefits for patients and professionals

Today’s telemedicine services, delivered by innovative small and medium sized enterprises on their own or in cooperation with public health systems, consist of teleconsultation, telemonitoring and counselling involving medical specialists. Examples of applications include telemonitoring of chronic heart failure patients, blood pressure measurement from a distance, video-conferencing between medical staff and online consultations with general practitioners and medical specialists.

These services are already having a huge positive impact on the quality of chronically ill patients and elderly people by allowing them to be cared for at home. At the same time, they correspond to the personalised care needs of young and highly mobile active citizens.

As for health care professionals - telemedicine services are making physicians’ everyday work easier, as teleconsultation of, for example, diabetes patients in remote areas saves them travel, time and costs.

Telemedicine also benefits patients and doctors in regions where lack of local specialists reduces access to specialist opinion and care. By networking physicians, nurses, radiologists and clinical support personnel it allows clinicians to consult with one another and quickly access medical information despite distances, thus allowing more accurate diagnosis, better and faster decision on a patient’s treatment.

This new type of health and social care services also offer medical professionals a whole range of new collaborative education and training as well as career opportunities on a dynamic and modern branch of medicine.

They also enable them to increase the number of patients cared for and enlarge the geographical scope of their field of work, while sticking to the highest medical quality in care.

Sustainable deployment closer than thought

With the increasing availability of interoperable eHealth infrastructures and development of innovative high medical quality telemedicine services, the European Health Telematics Association (EHTEL) believes that a paradigm shift towards sustainable telemedicine has started. The association’s recently published report entitled Sustainable Telemedicine: paradigms for future-proof healthcare provides an overview of current concrete European, national and regional level progress towards this goal.

“The paradigm shift is about going beyond the existing eHealth infrastructures and reinvigorating the many existing clinical ICT applications so that a new generation of truly integrated sustainable health services can emerge,” said Marc Lange, the EHTEL Secretary General.

To be sustainable, telemedicine thus needs to be considered as an integral part of eHealth deployment and infrastructures, not something separate. New entrepreneurial health professionals are already delivering quality care through teleconsultation, -monitoring and -counselling for thousands of patients – pioneering the shift from reactive to preventive healthcare and from hospital-centric to person-centred systems.

EHTEL hopes many more will soon join this movement and help complete the paradigm shift through collegiate networks of physicians, nurses, clinical support personnel and other medical specialists both to increase the efficiency of their work and to enable better patient health outcomes through cross-sectoral medical collaboration and integrated health services.