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TELEHEALTH BENEFITS PEOPLE OF ALL AGES The intense demand on established healthcare services in Queensland has prompted the introduction of an array of telehealth services throughout the state, which aim to provide a solution that is not only more efficient and effective but also to reduce travel time and improve clinical outcomes. The University of Queensland’s Centre for Online Health (COH) is one of the driving forces for researching and developing clinically appropriate and economically sustainable telehealth services.
JOANNE GREY Centre for Online Health j.grey@uq.edu.au
Part of the School of Medicine within the Faculty of Health Sciences at the University of Queensland, the COH is recognised internationally for its role in research, service delivery and education and training in the fields of telemedicine, telehealth and eHealth. The centre’s keys areas of activity include clinically focused research; academic and vocational education and training; and the provision of clinical telemedicine services, including one of the world’s largest paediatric telemedicine services. It also conducts ground-breaking research into telehealth services for residential aged care, and has been intimately involved in helping to develop sustainable telehealth services for people living in rural areas of the state. The director of the COH, Professor Len Gray, believes telehealth is ideal for people living in Australia, particularly for rural and remote Queenslanders.
About the author Joanne Grey is the communications and media manager for the Centre for Online Health and the Centre for Research in Geriatric Medicine. She is responsible for the promotion of the two centres, as well as the proACT clinical telehealth programs, the Health-e-Regions project, RES-e-CARE and the ConTAC project.
“Telehealth allows patients to remain in their community with family support, save money usually spent on travel and have equal access to specialist care,” Professor Gray says. “Telehealth provides a valuable means of distributing a wide range of specialist services, irrespective of
location. Patients of all ages are provided with access to specialist services where typically they would be very limited or nonexistent.” He says telehealth also fosters networking and collaboration between specialists at tertiary hospitals and regional clinicians, which in turn strengthens the capabilities of regional health services and helps ensure that patients can be treated as close to home as possible. The COH focuses on clinical research with an emphasis on examining the feasibility, efficacy, clinical effectiveness and economics of telehealth in a variety of settings. While it may constitute the more mundane aspects of healthcare provision, the development of sustainable services is essential, Professor Gray says. He believes the biggest challenge in expanding telehealth services is now not so much technology, but rather issues like organisation and funding. “Who is going to pay, can it be done through Medicare or is the hospital at the other end going to pay? Now that we’ve got the technology sorted out and the right environment, our challenge is