Telehealth - Healthcare Informatic's Golden Egg
Telehealth is the next revolution to happen in the way medicine is delivered.
Three types of this overall category of health informatics are home health care,
military, and pathology applications. Recent advancements in technology such as
increases in internet bandwidth, encryption, and increased hardware
capabilities, have destroyed previous notions of social interaction.
Telehealth and Social Change
 The
internet has enabled unbridled access to information and thus has made available
a global perspective leading to the most rapid advancement of social change this
world has ever witnessed. News applications like Flipboard deliver news stories
for free and in a fun format. Social networking websites like Facebook, YouTube,
and LinkedIn allow users amazing networking power, power strong enough to topple
governments. Users of these technologies will soon demand aspects of these
technological mediums for similar social change in the way their healthcare is
delivered. Telehealth is the advancement of this social change into the realm of
medicine.
Full Service Home Care
 Home
care is a broad range of health care within the realm of telehealth which is as
diverse as the number of diseases and conditions which can be inflicted upon
human beings and the current technological home monitoring solutions available
to solve them. Philip’s telehealth TeleStation provides a customizable means to
implement home care for any disease. This technology includes a user interface
screen which is customizable for different conditions and managing diseases and
also Philip’s has a licensed line of other compatible input devices including
pulse oximeter, blood pressure, scales, electro cardio gram, and others
including blood glucometer. All of these devices provide input on the patient
condition and can be utilized to help clinicians focus on decompensating
patients.
DARPA to the Rescue
Often times breakthroughs are made first in the military. DARPA, or the
Defense Advanced Research Proposal Agency, was after all a large funder of the
internet. DARPA is always looking for the next breakthrough in technology and
having envisioned promise in the internet, it is now looking to fund telehealth,
specifically portable and low cost electro encephalogram devices which could
record brain patterns (Dillow, 2013). Amazingly, this coupled with rapidly
developing research in brain function and electrical patterns could lead to
real-time stroke or seizure detection (Zandi, Javidan, Dumont & Tafreshi, 2010).
It could then be possible, once developed, to implement an embedded device in
clothing to provide additional input to a system as noted above in Philip’s
TeleStation.
Blackberry using medical waveform
software to read electro encephalogram results
Slide to the Right
Pathology is another healthcare field teetering on the brink of social change
through telehealth. The Food and Drug Administration (FDA) is responsible for
reviewing medical procedures and diagnosis techniques in the United States. A
good deal of the pathologists work is reviewing microscope slides for signs of
cellular abnormalities. There is a growing technique known as whole slide
imaging (WSI) gaining popularity which involves essentially phasing out
physician microscopic identification. The process involves the scanning of
prepared slides and producing high resolution images. The system could be
further advanced with the implementation of detection algorithms from a computer
for abnormalities. Currently the FDA does not recognize WSI as a valid diagnosis
tool, although the College of American Pathologists recently published proposed
guidelines for the serious validation of this technique (Pantanowitz, Sinard,
Henricks, Fatheree, Carter, Contis, Beckwith & Evans, 2013). Regardless of
current state, the future for an approved diagnosis utilizing WSI algorithms is
very promising for rapid screening of multiple conditions (Gherardi & Bevilacqua,
2013).
Bring it Home
The discussion of these three facets of telehealth is the mere tip of the
iceberg. It will only be further advanced with future increase in internet
bandwidth or the rate of information transferred. Ever increasingly complex data
encryption methods will put all parties at ease. The end of Moore’s Law, which
states that the processing power will double approximately every two years, has
no foreseeable end according to large microprocessor manufacturer Intel (Shah,
2013). Therefore, devices will continually become more powerful and smaller.
Given these phenomena, the health informatics worker has a strong future in
building our future telehealth infrastructure.
References:
Dillow, C. (2013, January 4). On darpa's 2013 wish list: Extreme
diving,pportable brain reading, and gravity vision. Retrieved from //www.popsci.com/technology/article/2013-01/darpas-2013-wish-list-robotic-dive-doctor-portable-brain-reading-and-gravity-vision
Gherardi, A., & Bevilacqua, A. (2013). Real-time whole slide
mosaicing for non-automated microscopes in histopathology analysis. Journal of
pathology informatics, 4(9), doi: 10.4103/2153-3539.109867
Pantanowitz, L., Sinard, J., Henricks, W., Fatheree, L.,
Carter, A., Contis, L., Beckwith, B., & Evans, A. (2013). Validating whole slide
imaging for diagnostic purposes in pathology. Archives of pathology and
laboratory medicine, doi: 10.5858/arpa.2013-0093-CP
Shah, A. (2013, May 8). Intel: We don't see the end of moore's
law yet. Retrieved from //www.citeworld.com/mobile/21843/intel-moores-law-not-dead
Zandi, A., Javidan, M., Dumont, G., & Tafreshi, R. (2010).
Automated real-time epileptic seizure detection in scalp eeg recordings using an
algorithm based on wavelet packet transform. Biomedical engineering,57(7),
1639-1651. doi: 10.1109/TBME.2010.2046417.
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