Chapter 6: ISDN in Medicine and Health Care

Remote Video Consultations

Video links between doctors and their patients has just begun to be tested in hospitals nationwide. Yet early practitioners have been amazed at the thoroughness and accuracy these remote consultations have brought to patient care, and point to the enormous potential for extending these links to rural clinics, nursing homes, hospices and literally scores of similarly remote locations.

The New England Medical Center, a 450-bed hospital complex in Boston, for example, is beginning to develop video conferencing capabilities that will reach out to long-term health facilities, such as nursing homes, hospices and the like. According to John Patterson, the hospital's director for advanced planning, many nursing-home patients who travel to a hospital are not admitted, but are returned to their facilities for treatment. By installing an ISDN video link, he noted in an interview, patients can have immediate access to quality healthcare without the time and cost of hospital visits.

At the Medical College of Georgia in Augusta, a similar program is already in place. Doctors use BRI video links to extend modern medicine to rural areas throughout the state. These video consultations put the diagnostic expertise of a doctor on one end of the connection, and the patient with a caring health-care professional on the other.

The doctor can see and talk with the patient, employ a wide range of instrumentation - from blood pressure readings and electrocardiograms to results from a series of medical devices - and examine the patient as thoroughly as if they were in the same office.