A Telemedicine system, a scientific approach
During the last decade, the technological progress has been phenomenal. This is especially impressive in the field of digital communications.
Now days, it is possible for people to have a highly efficient and practically cost free real time audio-video and information file (text, and/or image) sharing capability between any two (or more) people around the world.
Tele Learning/Teleconference (TL/TC), and Telemedicine (TM) are two examples which use such technological advances.
At times, the occurrence of some conditions such as:
- The occurrence of transmittable diseases such as the Corona virus-19, flu viruses, and others.
- Environmental disasters such as hurricanes, tornados, severe flooding, extreme environmental temperature changes, earthquakes, wars.
- Cases of physically handicapped people who cannot travel or live in rural areas that make it difficult to attend any universities for enhancing their professional skills.
Gives us no other choice and force us to participate in TL/TC, or TM activities.
In what follows, we describe some of the advantages of both TL/TC, and TM activities, and more specifically explore the creation of an effective and practically useful TM system, which we believe is going to be how medicine is going to be conducted in the future for convenience, and economic reasons for patients and medical practitioners.
TL/TC Activities
Now days, universities, research organizations and businesses meetings are routinely conducted using such systems. Courses and even degrees (including graduate degrees) are already offered by almost every university in the world. A well-known highly regarded organization that offers high quality lectures is coursera. com. Using coursera.com, people from anywhere in the world can attend high quality lectures on any subject they wish, offered worldwide by distinguished lecturers at low or no cost. In addition to the standard lectures, students could also participate in virtual laboratory experiments and laboratory work remotely. In the past, such activities were prohibitively expensive.
The benefits of distance learning (DL/TC) are:
Offer a large number of choices of high quality courses, subjects, and instructors that can satisfy any desire are available. The cost of attending such courses may be high or low depending on the reputation of the organization involved and quality and level of the presented material.
Offer economic advantages for the student, and the instructors. The fact that more students (from all over the world) can attend lectures will probably decrease the tuition cost while increase the income of the instructor and the organization that manages the activity. In addition, for the student who has chosen the TL option, it could be considerable financial benefit, because is going to minimize or completely eliminate his/her living, transportation, and rental expenses.
Of course, although the benefit of remotely conducting such activities is great, it will be done at the cost of the important real life social contact.
Unfortunately or fortunately, now days and even more strongly in the future, we will be forced to operate in a totally different world, the world of digital electronic age. However, such as a change in our modus operandi, could be very beneficial, if huddled, as a combination of DL/TC and limited real physical interaction.
An additional economic benefit will be the elimination of rental and maintenance costs of the physical facility needed for conducting the lectures and the laboratory activities,
Pollution reduction by minimizing the daily transportation of the millions of the students and instructors involved.
Stress reduction for students and instructors, by reducing traveling time.
Telemedicine (TM)
The area where Space Age Technology (SAT) can be applied and serve individualized medical needs in a worldwide scale is TM. Presently, there are TM activities going on worldwide. However, the level of sophistication of such activities is rather basic and they usually consist of only few minutes’ telephone and/or video communications between the doctor and the patient. Then, on the basis of such communication, the doctor makes a diagnosis and provides some guidance to the patient. It does not take much common sense to conclude that such interaction could be incomplete, inaccurate and therefore risky. Basically, it is a little bit better than nothing and provides, more or less a psychological help than an accurate diagnosis. In this proposition, we discuss a considerably more complete information exchange between the patient and the doctor, and therefore more scientifically based diagnosis. We may even claim, that the proposed scheme will be even better than the actual visitation to the doctor’s office where the patient is usually first interviewed by a nurse (or doctor’s assistant), and then by the doctor who spends about 10 minutes and asks some additional questions which, usually, the patient answers in a harry, and which may be not so accurate. On the other hand, our proposed approach will assist the patient to answer these questions while he is at ease. We believe that TM may be needed in the future because the conditions created by serious diseases and factors that may require isolation such as the corona -19 or other unforeseen hard conditions that may appear in the future.
Benefits of using TM
The economic benefit for the patient, the medical practitioner, and the organization which coordinates the activity between a patient and the medical doctor he chooses could be significant (much the same as in the case TL). This is obvious because the greater the number of patients for the participating doctor, the greater the financial benefit for him will be and cost of the service to the patient may be lower. Furthermore, if the communication between the patient and the doctor is properly organized the doctor’s response time required to make the diagnosis will be fast, the diagnosis more accurate (since the diagnosis is going to be based on a better organized information data sheet that the patient will provide to the doctor), less stressful for the doctor, and more formal,
For the patient the benefits will be:
Economic A yearly low cost membership (this membership will include a number of medical equipment with very clear and professionally done audio-video instructions of how to use the equipment to obtain the necessary medical Measurements, and a software package to simplify the patient – doctor communication) can be created that will be afforded by anyone in the world), convenient since he will have a greater number of medical provider choices, faster, more accurate, and better controlled services since the patient will provide to the doctor a more carefully organized set of data (measurable and not measurable) which more surely, will help the doctor make a faster more rigorous diagnosis and make recommendations.
The level of telemedicine that we are talking about here is restricted only to the services of the internist and may be of few other specialists. However, the proposed TM system will be a level higher than the existing ones and will be continuously evolved as technology is improved. If needed, specialized medical services and laboratory examinations will be recommended.
- Patient Information collected by a patient, organized in an easy to understand and interpret format and transmitted to the doctor, with some basic analysis of the data could be provided and will assist the doctor to do a more accurate first level of diagnosis and proper recommendations.
- Medical data prepared by the patient
- Format of the patient’s medical information sheet
- General Data: Age, weight, height, gender, race, parents and grandparents medical history, stress level, eating habits, sleeping habits, physical activity, mental activity, patients existing health condition, where you live, social activity, marital status, other, economic stress, smoking, obesity level, drinking alcohol, use drugs ).
- Medical information obtained from specialized medical images: x-rays, CT scans, MRI, images, ultra sound data, cardiolite tests.
- Photos of skin problems: swollen legs, moles, AP or Lateral pics of spine, fingers, nails, etc. Also photos of spine deformities and curvatures that may indicate kyphosis or scoliosis
- Measurable data: High blood pressure, pulses, Blood profile, EKG (with some analysis), oxygen level, Hemoglobin A1C among others.
Blood profile:
EKG:
List of symptoms:
- Use a human body picture with mouse interaction
- Click on the location (i.e. (x,y) point) in the body where a problem may be present.
- A list of organs existing in the neighborhood of that point (x, y)
- List of organs at (x,y) point.
- Click on each organ
- A list of symptom should be displayed
- Select the symptoms that are present with a yes or no option and the level of severity of the symptoms (i.e. 1 to 10). Create statistics of severity of symptoms.
- Get a quick diagnosis
The use of a question-answer algorithm to do a quick diagnosis with information about the probable problem and recommendations of how to handle it. This questionnaire will help the patient to have an idea about his/her problem before contacting the doctor.
A network of highly reputable medical doctors with contact information package for every major city and for each country should be created.
Package: includes everything
- A professionally done video/YouTube material of how to use and how to do correctly medical measurements
- Record patient’s data and transmit them to the doctor of your choice
- Statistical analysis and correlations of data
- Analysis of data
- Information available in major languages
- Legal matters
- Advertising
- Yearly or 5 year Membership or other way
