The Australian National Telemedicine Summit was held from 16-17th March 2009 in Sydney. It was organised by the IIR conferences under the theme “Creating a Viable Alternative to Face-to-Face Medical Care“. About fifty attendees including decision makers, doctors, nurses and technology experts came from around the country. The meeting was chaired by the ICMCC Vice-President Prof. K. Yogesan, President of the Australasian Telehealth Society. The keynote lectures were given by Peter Fleming, CEO of the National E-Health Transition Authority and Deena Shiff, Group Managing Director, Telstra Business. Mr. Fleming discussed about e-Health initiatives and Ms Shiff talked about “getting ready for the e-Health revolution“.
Other lectures focused on Call Center initiatives from around the Country, a well established service provision in Australia. One of the initiatives is Healthdirect Australia, utilized in Australian Capital Territory, New South Wales, South Australia and Western Australia. Victoria and Queensland use their own Call Center initiatives.
There was a talk on telehealth standards by Prof Maeder, Chair of the Telehealth sub-committee of Standards Australia. This committee is working to establish standards for telehealth technologies such as diagnostics and imaging, and clinical service delivery.
One of the interesting topics was regulatory and medico legal issues and solutions presented by a law company based in Sydney. They even mentioned the one and only telemedicine related lawsuit in Australia, related to misinterpretation of radiological images and missed diagnosis. However, the audience disagreed that this issue is telemedicine related as image interpretation is part of clinical practice in radiology.
The second day of the meeting dealt with case studies from leading experts in the field. The topics covered were teleradiology, utilization of telemedicine in primary care clinics, the evidence-based, telephone delivered, coaching program for patients with chronic disease, video phone technology for rural telemedicine program and online clinical treatment of the anxiety disorders.
K. Yogesan
