OTN
![]() | In my previous post I reviewed some of the ways Telemedicine is being used across the province to support care of the elderly. In this post I’ll review findings from articles that explore the use and benefits of telemedicine in geriatrics.
A recent article published by Baycrest, compares a face-to-face session versus a telemedicine session for clinic-based group cognitive behavioural therapy (CBT) with adults who suffer from depression and anxiety. The results of which show that group CBT can be delivered in a technology... |
![]() | If you see a guy holding a white hockey puck to his forehead, that’ll be Jesse Hirsh. If you see a guy checking his heart rate on his watch, that’ll be Ed Brown.
At OTN’s fabulously successful March 30 Hackathon, Jesse interviewed Ed about the future of connected, virtual health care. The first topic on the agenda was the engaged patient. That segued rather quickly to comparisons of personal health monitoring devices. Jesse showed the audience his Scanadu Scout. It looks like a hockey puck and measures blood pressure, heart rate, temperature and blood oxygen levels, sending the data to your iPhone. Ed, who has a Peak Basis watch that monitors heart rate, among other things, pulled out his smart phone, calling it the... |
![]() | 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... |
The future of virtual care is mHealth – incorporating mobile devices into the delivery of virtual services. Recently, I wrote about how OTN is offering Personal Videoconferencing on a personal computer, so you don’t need to go to a room-based studio with a codec and a camera. Instead, you can download software onto a personal computer, and conduct the consultation over that device via the internet with other endpoints, whether it’s a Personal Videoconferencing device or a room-based studio. Eventually this functionality will be extended to any mobile device – tablet or... | |
OTN was established in 1997 with the vision that telemedicine will be a mainstream channel for healthcare delivery and education. There were several barriers initially including startup costs, a compelling business case, a process for scheduling events, paying doctors, and overcoming health care professionals’ (HCP) resistance to using the technologies. A business and operational strategy was developed, always keeping in mind the need to be as easy and convenient to use as face-to-face encounters.
OTN currently has four channels of virtual care:
Elective Virtual Ambulatory Care: Last year OTN supported over 300,000 provider/patient real-time video consultations in over 40 specialty services. The top 5 therapeutic... | |
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... | |
Many small communities throughout Ontario don’t have a local psychiatrist, so it can be challenging at times for people in these communities to receive psychiatric services. Telepsychiatry gives people in these communities the opportunity to interact one-on-one with a psychiatrist from another part of the province. Moreover, people with mobility issues need only to travel to a local Telehealth studio, rather than to a psychiatrist’s office.
We’ve had very positive reactions from people that have participated in one-to-one psychiatric patient videos. The patients feel very comfortable – in fact, we’ve had some patients tell us they’re... | |
![]() | More than a decade ago, a new approach to treating an acute stroke was developed that involved administering tPA within 3-4 hours of the onset of an acute ischemic stroke. tPA dissolves a clot and restores circulation, resulting in a dramatic patient recovery. Where tPA was effective, most patients were able to resume their lives rather than being permanently disabled with paralysis and/or neurological loss.
The issue with administering tPA is that not all strokes are caused by a blood clot; sometimes the strokes are caused by a hemorrhage into the brain. If tPA is given to these patients the stroke is made worse. The standard of care in most jurisdictions, is that a... |
Back in 2007 OTN’s primary focus was extending telemedicine – in the form of real-time videoconferencing – beyond hospitals, but we were also examining how to expand our program offerings. “Store forward” – an application that allows information to be sent to a secure server where it can be downloaded at another time – had been used for years in the United States, in particular, at Veterans Affairs and the Alaska Federal Health Care Access Network (AFHCAN). There were also a number of papers and presentations delivered at ATA on store forward use in dermatology. OTN decided to... | |
In my previous post on the ways OTN is linking the healthcare community in Ontario, I reviewed how the Northeast Cancer Centre (NCC) is using virtual care to improve both the patient and physician experience. Here are a few more examples of telemedicine in action:
Neurotrauma follow-up: A patient in a remote community with post-injury epilepsy, cognitive impairments and mobility issues travelled alone every few months to Toronto for follow-up consultations with a neurologist. Anxiety related to travel and the disruption of the patient’s routine interfered with the progress and success of his recovery. When his follow-up appointments with... | |
OTN est un organisme indépendant à but
non lucratif, qui est financé par
le Gouvernement de l’Ontario.