OTN
![]() | There are tremendous opportunities for telemedicine use in the care of the elderly in both urban and rural settings. Typically, as people age they become mentally and physically infirm, which can make travelling distances problematic. This makes care of the elderly ideally suited for multiple streams of telemedicine.
OTN’s early applications of telemedicine for the elderly were to support elderly people in long-term care homes. Initially, OTN worked with long-term care homes to enable video, which allowed providers to consult over Videoconference and eliminated the need for the resident to travel. This was quickly adopted into cognitive assessments with geriatric psychiatry. Videoconferencing lends itself well to people who need... |
Extension for Community Healthcare Outcomes, better known as Project ECHO, is a multi-disciplinary collaborative model of medical education and care management that helps increase access to specialty care and “de-monopolizes” specialized services. The model facilitates a virtual peer-to-peer group via video conference for primary care providers and empowers them with new knowledge to manage challenging patients with selective types of complex chronic diseases.
Project ECHO started in 2003 by looking at Hepatitis C, and has since evolved to include supporting patients with HIV, chronic pain, rheumatoid arthritis, and other chronic complex diseases. These diseases are often a challenge for a... | |
![]() | I’ve had jobs that made me cry – don’t ask – but this may be the first time I’ve had a job that caused me to make other people cry.
With a lot of help from other team members, I make videos and write stories about Telehomecare. I talk to patients and their family caregivers, their nurses or respiratory therapists and doctors. From time to time, we visit patients in their homes. That’s where Telehomecare connects them with a clinician who monitors their vital signs remotely and coaches them about how to live their best possible life.
Then we tell their stories on screen, in news stories and on our web site so that people – and health care providers – learn about the program and how it can... |
Telehomecare is focused on supporting patients with long-term chronic diseases. As our population ages, more and more people are living with chronic diseases, which means they’ll be seeing physicians more and going to the hospital more. This results in higher costs for the healthcare system. So the healthcare system is looking for ways of supporting these people to live optimally with their chronic disease, and to minimize the need for them to engage with the healthcare system. The Telehomecare program is a way of helping people understand their illness better, and to self-manage their chronic disease without the need for interacting with the healthcare system.
A Telehomecare... | |
OTN is an independent, not-for-profit
organization funded by the
Government of Ontario.