Vik Kirsch
vkirsch@guelphmercury.com
GUELPH — When St. Joseph’s Health Centre resident Mary Smedley consults a geriatrician in London, Ont., she doesn’t have the frustration of spending several hours making the round trip to that southern Ontario city.
Through digital telemedicine, the 87-year-old woman can avoid the hassle of getting in and out of a wheelchair, travel by vehicle on a gurney and lounge in a waiting room to see her specialist.
State-of-the-art, two-way video-conferencing equipment at St. Joseph’s, a chronic, long-term and outpatient facility, allow her virtually instant access.
“I found it really exciting. I found it very useful,” Smedley said Wednesday, adding it’s the only realistic option for a person with limited mobility like herself.
“I couldn’t go to London. I wouldn’t even think of it.”
It was particularly satisfying for Smedley because the specialist was formerly from Guelph.
“We picked up where we left off.”
Increasingly, Guelphites, including many outpatients, are choosing to follow the personable Smedley’s example and take advantage of telemedicine technology, which has been used dozens of times at St. Joe’s since its introduction slightly more than a year ago. To date, it’s connected the Guelph centre to specialists as far afield as Huntsville, Hamilton, Toronto and Ottawa. The mobile equipment’s set up in a small room in St. Joe’s outpatient area of the ambulatory-care wing.
The main components are an easily adjustable motorized high-definition zoom camera on top of a screen. It can fan the room and look down an adjacent hall, so a physician from a remote location can closely examine a patient or watch how he walks. A second camera on a tripod is even more portable. The cameras can, for example, zoom in for highly detailed explorations of a person’s throat and other body parts.
That could be hands and feet, as well as wounds or other injuries.
“It’s the only blue room in the building,” said registered nurse Cory Waechter, adding that’s to reduce glare. She operates the equipment and assists patients.
“They can really see minutia on the body.”
She noted, for example, a transplant surgeon in Toronto last week assessed a woman at St. Joe’s suffering from mouth sores following a recent operation.
To date, the main use of telemedicine at St. Joe’s is in post-operation followup care.
But Waechter sees telemedicine expanding its scope because of its efficient use of limited health resources, particularly as the Canadian population ages.
“We’re doing a lot more geriatric (consultations) now,” Waechter said by way of example.
St. Joe’s is the lead organization for telemedicine in the region, seeking to bring other health-care providers on board.
We really believe in complex continuing care, rehabilitation and ambulatory care, senior director Terrie Dean said.
“We’re very dedicated to telemedicine and how it can improve health care overall.”
That includes using the teleconferencing equipment for staff education workshops and as a management tool, said St. Joe’s librarian Lindsay Ogilvie, noting her facility is part of the not-for-profit Ontario Telemedicine Network that promotes educational opportunities.
Over little more than a year, St. Joe’s has participated in more than 40 training sessions and archived webcasts as long-term resources.
Ogilvie said the sky’s the limit on education opportunities, from speech language pathology to social work, nursing and volunteerism.
Health-care managers can also gather, virtually, to discuss issues like rehabilitation services planning without having to gather at one site.
“It’s a great time saver,” Ogilvie said.
That also translates into cost savings for the health-care system, Dean added.