Telemedicine Lets Doctors Make Long-Distance House Calls

Thanks to high-speed internet connections, Ethiopians taken to understaffed hospitals will soon have access to big-city medical experts.

In a consulting room at the Black Lion teaching hospital in Ethiopia's capital, Addis Ababa, a pregnant woman lies on a couch, while an ultrasound image is taken of her baby. [...]

But what is special about this consulting room is that as the image appears here, it appears simultaneously on a similar computer screen at the Care Hospital, a specialist hospital in Hyderabad in southern India.

The plan, currently operating in three of the country's hospitals and -- according to the BBC -- due to be implemented across Africa, is intriguing. On the one hand, having a doctor present in person beats having a local health worker serving as a go-between. On the other, until there's enough doctors for everyone, this sure beats having no care at all.

On a related note, the Associated Press covered a videoconferencing robot doctor system last week:

"The system allows you to be anywhere in the hospital from anywhere in the world," said the surgeon, who specializes in weight-loss surgery.

Besides his normal morning and afternoon in-person rounds, Gandsas uses the $150,000 robot to visit patients at night or when problems arise.
The robot can circle the bed and adjust the position of its two cameras, giving "the perception from the patient's standpoint that the doctor is there," the surgeon said.

I feel even more ambivalent about that. In some cases, it's great that doctors can pay semi-personalized visits from a distance. However, in an age where patients are already lucky to get a few minutes of in-person attention, and health providers are under ever-increasing attention to measure bottom lines in terms of profits rather than health, I'd rather hospitals spend their money on more people rather than more robots.

Some Wired coverage of telemedicine here. (The article softened me a bit, actually -- given the ridiculously long time spent in waiting rooms, talking to doctors from home about less-serious problems could save everyone some aggravation.)

Ethiopia's high speed hospitals [BBC]

Robot visits patients when doctor can't [Associated Press]