Specialist advice from a flat-screen TV

For the past 14 months, the 4000 residents of Westport have been receiving specialist medical advice from a large flat-screen TV.

Video conferencing equipment at Buller Health's offices in the South Island town is connected by high-speed internet to Grey Base Hospital, about 100km down the coast in Greymouth.

The set-up means Westport locals can communicate with Greymouth-based clinicians without needing to make the long journey south.

Patients are booked in for face-to-face video calls with the Greymouth-based doctors, and a nurse sits in on the consultations, acting as the remote physician's hands-on assistant if required.

Technology company Cisco installed the HealthPresence system in a trial it hopes will catch the interest of other district health boards around the country.

Cisco says that as well as saving patients the time and cost of travelling, the system has enabled staff to make quicker and more effective clinical decisions.

It also says the HealthPresence concept of delivering patient care has generally received strong support from both clinical and administrative staff at the West Coast DHB.

The Government's commitment to spend $1.5 billion over the next 10 years on a national high-speed broadband network has put the spotlight on initiatives like the West Coast medical teleconferencing trial.

There is general acceptance that ubiquitous high-speed broadband is a good thing, but how exactly will it enhance our lives?

Two years ago the New Zealand Institute think-tank estimated that broadband could conservatively deliver between $2.7 billion and $4.4 billion in productivity and growth benefits for the country.

It highlighted the health sector as a key beneficiary of the technology, saying broadband-based advances such as the ability to monitor patients' vital signs from home and keep updated nationally accessible health records would deliver benefits of between $620 million and $1.1 billion.

IBM New Zealand managing director Jennifer Moxon says an estimated 5000 people a year are the victims of medication errors in hospitals which result in about 150 deaths and leave more than 400 patients with permanent disabilities.

She says improving medicine tracking systems through the use of barcode scanning technology or radio frequency identification (RFID) tags would help cut error rates. Patients, and the public purse strings, would also benefit from home monitoring which would free up hospital beds.

If we were able to do things like improved bar-coding and RFID to prevent medication errors and if hospital patients were able to go home earlier, or avoid admission (through remote diagnosis, etc) there would be a significant direct benefit to the economy.

"It's estimated, for example, that there would be an improvement of 16 per cent in New Zealand's GDP by 2026 just by looking at some of those specific areas around healthcare," Moxon says.

The potential for technology to improve the country's health, while at the same time reducing the budget deficit, was also recognised in August's Horn Report, a sweeping review of the health sector by a committee headed by former Treasury Secretary Murray Horn.

Horn's committee concluded that better use of technology could improve collaboration between clinicians and be used to "better utilise and economise on those specialist skills in shortest supply".

IT research firm IDC says "telemedicine" - which includes the use of technology for a range of health services including remote patient monitoring, electronic health records, videoconference consultations, and the transmission of x-rays and other images - has the potential "to deliver care that is better, cheaper, and accessible to all".

IDC says electronic health records could reduce medical errors, decrease administrative costs and streamline the delivery of care.

"However, companies such as IBM that provide such solutions must tread carefully as concerns about privacy and unauthorised access to records are top of mind for consumers."

The Horn Report also recognised the benefits of having technology that allowed New Zealand health professionals in different organisations to access common patient records. But the report also noted that technology alone could not overcome the problems of implementing such a system.

"To be successful, a transferable electronic patient record needs to become part of the routine way health professionals work and work together," the report says.

"There is real advantage in starting to develop the ability of community, primary and secondary clinicians to work together first, rather than relying on an IT project to 'push' these changes."