[MUSIC] So in my background as a physiotherapist, I just kept finding myself in these rural and remote areas and the recurring theme that I kept finding was that this lack of access to quality injury management. And when I dug a bit deeper about that I found that in Australia alone approximately 1 million people every year will find themselves in a remote location with a musculoskeletal injury and so traditionally these people have had three main options available to them. They could travel long distances to seek healthcare. They could Google generic health information online, but that can be unsafe and lead to poor outcomes, or they could just leave their injury and do nothing about it. But we know that that leads to poorer outcomes and greater occurrences. So with Physios Online, we wanted to create a better way. So from the comfort of their home or their workplace, people can get a full assessment done of their injury, come up with a diagnosis of what they're dealing with and give them a rehab plan to continue on with, all at a distance. >> Because we have so many patients that we want to connect with. So with cancer survivors, there's about a million cancer survivors that we want to engage and connect with. And obviously face to face content isn't the best way to do that all the time. It's good for a lot of patients, particularly in acute settings, but maybe for follow-up settings using this data and having some kind of flagging mechanism and education mechanism behind that is a really good way to go forward. It means we can access millions and millions of patients without burdening the health system as much as it would. Because these patients are doing so well now, they're normally working part or full time. So often they don't have a couple of hours spare in the week to do their supportive care consults. So what we can do is maybe think of a different way to deliver that service. So we find that Skype, or video conferencing is a really, really good way of connecting with those patients. >> As a stroke neurologist, I am responsible for the Telestroke project we run out of the Newcastle Hospital. With this project we have two main parts. So, the first part is we try and deliver acute stroke care for patients that are at a distance from the hub center and the second part is we try to follow them up in a Telestroke clinic to consider the diagnostic or therapeutic changes. The reason we started this project is because we saw that a lot of patients didn't get the appropriate acute stroke treatment because in smaller hospitals that are the distance from the help center, often there is no neurologist present. And there wasn't the option to deliver for instance thrombolysis or thrombectomy. So with this project we tried to deliver that acute care to those patients. >> In addition there's a number of benefits for healthcare professionals to be able to harness these sorts of tools. I guess one of the biggest benefits is sort of the ability to access a broader patient group than we would otherwise be able to access in our traditional face to face clinics. And so for instance, we know that adolescents and young adults would like to kind of get together. And they'd like to meet each other in groups. But the logistics of actually ever being able to coordinate a group of young people back at the hospital would really be near to impossible most of the time, and take a lot of time in terms of logistics on their professional part. So I think these technologies can allow a professional to do something like running running a group program of young people. We fund groups with young people simultaneously in Sydney and Melbourne and WA, across the country. And you just couldn't do that if you were relying on face to face. >> Increasingly in radiology, we're seeing handheld devices being used to access imaging data and radiology reports. So doctors can see annotated radiological images pointing them and directing them towards the area of interest on an image, as well as accessing the reports. This is a huge benefit. Because being able to visualize what's wrong within an image helps the clinician to make decisions. >> As a clinician, I think eHealth could also offer some additional options for your patients in terms of empowering them to use other technologies. So I think once you get in the space of I'm going to use the computer and I'm going to interact with the patient via the computer. If you're using a computer then all of a sudden you can use the computer for other purposes, so you maybe able to then develop, to develop a treatment program that a person can access with their I-pad for example. And that is really important given what we know about treatment evidence in relation to neurological rehabilitation in particular speech pathology. because we know that the more treatment you get, the more intensive treatment you get, the more likely you are to improve. And current, I'd say, dated service delivery models, where a person's just getting face to face treatment one or two hours a week doesn't offer the sufficient intensity for a person to be able to benefit from that treatment. >> So when you enable a remote specialist to assist the local generalist team in this way, two different things can happen. One, we make better choices about whether the patient should be transported or not or if they need transport. It's amazing how often when you rely on the information, you have to err on the side of, well bring them here and we'll have a closer look. Whereas, when you've got much more information at your disposal and you can actually see the quantum response of the patient to your care, it allows you to triage much better. There are patients you won't bring to a central facility that could be 500 kilometers travel away, unnecessarily. So that's the first thing. The second thing of course is that you can start all the advance treatments early. It's amazing how much treatment is able to be delivered in what appear to be small sites. The treatments that matter in the first few hours of a condition are often quite simple treatments and with appropriate support and over the phone advice it's amazing how well the GPs and the nurses in these small sites can deliver excellent care. And what we've found with experience is that when you do this, the patients arrive in better condition and not only that, they can be transferred with lower levels of support. >> The most exciting thing about eHealth now is that we're actually starting to think about what it means to integrate e technologies into settings. Into schools, into universities, into workplaces. And into the community. And we haven't thought about it that way before. What that means is that we will fundamentally change the way people work, the way the contribute and the way we manage their care. >> In my role what eHealth means because I am functioning as an educator and I'm working on professional development is it allows me tools for blended learning. It allows me to teach people remotely. It allows me to customize the education more for the needs of those providers. It also allows me very importantly, to take the education, and put it into their workflow. In other words the tools, the electronic tools, the technology allows for immediate access of information. And so in that regard the person, rather than being in a separate stand alone educational activity, is really in a dialogue with the information and the content and is really developing knowledge while they're in their workflow. So it's more engaging to them it's more interactive with them and I think in the long run it's more impactful for them and they'll remember and utilize the information better and I think technology is making all of that happen. >> So I think that, with Telehealth, a lot of the dialogue is around the advantages to the patient, and rightly so. We can certainly improve access and improve quality of healthcare for the patients. But it also gives unprecedented opportunities to the actual health professional themselves. Health professionals can now have the flexibility to work from a cafe or on a tropical holiday or simple move house and still be able to continue their caseload. So, I think it's a great opportunity and yeah it gives us a lot of options that we may not have had before. [MUSIC]
