Performance of a wireless telemedicine system in a hospital accident and emergency department

Abstract

Abstract:Until recently, teleconsultation was performed by transferring the patient from the Accidents and Emergency department, to a specially equipped room, or by moving large and heavy machinery to the patient trolley. Both these solutions were impractical if not impossible in the majors or resuscitation areas of the department. Recently, performance indicators of dealing with 90% of patients within four hours were introduced for A&E departments in the UK, so the pressure is on to rapidly deal with patients in the majors or trolley area of the department. This paper presents an integrated system called MedLAN dedicated for use inside the A&E department. Its purpose is to wirelessly support high-quality live video, audio, high-resolution still images and networks support from anywhere there is WLAN coverage. It is capable of transmitting all of the above to a consultant sitting at a computer terminal either inside or outside the hospital. To implement this, it makes use of the existing IEEE 802.11b/g wireless technology.This paper shows that the new system is capable of delivering telemedicine with a small light trolley without any trailing wires in the all important trolley area of the department, which now needs a lot of consultant input to meet UK regulations of 90% of all patients to be discharged or admitted within four hours. The equipment is safe to use and can easily move from one area of the department to the other.

Impact of Telemedicine Upon Rural Trauma Care

“…high resolution images, sounds, live video, and patient records) from one location to another. This concept has being explored in a growing number of medical specialties, including dermatology, 2-3 oncology, 4,5 outpatient burn victims follow-up, 6 radiology, 7 cardiology, 8 -12 psychiatry, 13,14 emergency medical services (EMS), [15][16][17] rural medicine, 10,19 nephrology, urology, 20,21 emergency department (ED), 16,22,23 and home health care. 24 The University of Mississippi Medical Center is the only Level I trauma hospital in the state with an average of 3,500 trauma activations/yr of which 60% are transferred from local community hospital (LCH) with Level II-IV trauma status designation.…”

Wireless live streaming video of surgical operations: an evaluation of communication quality

“…In most studies, more or less subjective scoring systems or questionnaires are used to assess the opinion of the users about the quality of data transmission. 1,11,12 Although the methodology of these subjective ratings has been significantly refined with the introduction of the Absolute Category Rating, 13,14 which is still frequently used, 15 there are no standardized tools to assess the objective effect of audiovisual communication. Therefore, we created a new test set depicting 20 different video segments of surgical intervention.…”

Telehealth dashboard: leverage reporting functionality to increase awareness of high-acuity emergency department patients across an enterprise practice

“…The USA has seen a dramatic expansion in telehealth programme driven by the critical need to provide high-quality care while reducing healthcare costs 1–24. To date, most acute care telehealth activity has focused on Telestroke1 2; however, Emergency Medicine (EM) is a specialty uniquely positioned to directly impact patient movement and system utilisation.…”