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 complex assessments but do not have the local healthcare team resource to perform the assessment.
Another avenue that is opening up with telemedicine is providing care to the resident in their home, outside of the long-term care facility. This enables people to stay home longer without needing institutional care. This can allow the resident to self-manage, with the assistance of their family, for longer periods of time. Baycrest has done work with behavioural support for people with memory disorder and helped them manage and better cope with these deficits while remaining in-home.
There are also many services that Community Care Access Centre (CCAC) delivers to the elderly in their homes, and this can be supplemented from time to time with video. When video is incorporated, and a regulated health care professional is present, a patient can potentially link from their home to a physician or consultant specializing in elderly care when there’s a specific problem, and the physician can bill OHIP.
At OTN, Telehomecare is a patient self-management program that engages patients as partners in their care plan - right in their home. Telehomecare Nurses teach, coach and remotely monitor a patient’s health status through the use of technology. It’s one way to manage chronic disease and a catalyst for change in how health care is delivered.
In my next blog post I’ll review articles that support the use of telemedicine in care of the elderly.
