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...

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...

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...

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...