TV doctors tune in to help

By PETER GRIFFIN

Whangarei, Dargaville, the Bay of Islands and Kaitaia hospitals have installed videoconferencing units to bring medical expertise to the more remote parts of the north, and reduce the need for patients to travel long distances for appointments.

The five Tandberg videoconferencing units will enable specialists in the main centres and overseas health institutions to consult Northland Health doctors, displaying x-rays and patient information and even performing remote examinations.

While "telemedicine" is widely used throughout New Zealand, remote areas which would best benefit from the technology have been slow to receive it.

In a similar situation, doctors on the west coast of the South Island use videoconferencing to link with services in Christchurch, avoiding the difficulty of recruiting doctors for Westport and Greymouth.

Roger Tuck, a paediatrician at Whangarei Hospital and a strong advocate of telemedicine, said time would tell how significantly the videoconferencing units, installed at around $23,000 each, would reduce costs, but the technology was already proving its worth.

"If we don't use this technology, we have to put people in cars, which takes them away from their work."

Linkups with overseas hospitals were largely trouble-free, said Dr Tuck, but national linkups were hindered by the technology's scattered availability.

"The limitation from our point of view is that local organisations, even the Starship Hospital, aren't very organised in this area. We've found it a lot easier to talk to colleagues in Sydney and Melbourne."

Tony Temaru, visual communication product manager at Tandberg distributor Canon, said hospitals were moving towards patient archive communications, where doctors could display patient records, pictures and scans for colleagues via a video link.

Rob Love, of AVC-Tandberg, said he expected steady growth in the use of videoconferencing in the health sector and among largely companies, which had been surprisingly slow in their uptake of videoconferencing despite the savings it could provide.

"The cost of putting someone on a reasonably short flight may be up to $1000.

"If you take into account the executive downtime in putting them on a plane, many companies would consider the cost to be much higher."

The company opened a videoconferencing bureau at Auckland's CityLife Hotel last week that will give businesses 24-hour access to videoconferencing facilities at a cost of $600 for the first hour and $100 for each hour after.

The bureau has already hosted several corporate conferences, and was used by a local recruitment agency to set up a face-to-face job interview for a candidate with a company in Ireland. New Zealand experts are expected to present evidence to the Royal Commission on Genetic Modification using the videconferencing suite this month.

Mr Tandberg said markets for its equipment in Europe and the United States were "achieving critical mass" and sales last year were $US111.1 million ($254 million), up 80 per cent on 1998.