Today, we slip back in time to 1925 and put on our Flash Gordon glasses to speculate about the future, a time when a doctor not only “sees what is going on in the patient’s room by means of a television screen” but also employs a robotic-like instrument called the Teledactyl (Tele, far; Dactyl, finger — from the Greek) to “feel at a distance.”
This image and the story comes from a delightful Smithsonian blog called Paleofuture in a post entitled Telemedicine Predicted in 1925. The post discusses an article by Hugo Gernsback that appeared in the February, 1925 issue of Science and Invention. You can read more about the intriguing robotoic Teledactyl device and Gernsback’s predictions for medicine of the future.
Fast forward to 2010, and we see how remarkably prescient Mr. Gernsback’s predictions were. Courtesy of a blog comment by Christoph Hadnagy, we find this link to a New York Times story on Denmark Leads the Way in Digital Care, in which 77-year old patient Jens Danstrup talks about what it’s like to be a telemedicine patient:
“You see how easy it is for me?” Mr. Danstrup said, sitting at his desk while video chatting with his nurse at Frederiksberg University Hospital, a mile away. “Instead of wasting the day at the hospital?”
He clipped an electronic pulse reader to his finger. It logged his reading and sent it to his doctor. Mr. Danstrup can also look up his personal health record online. His prescriptions are paperless — his doctors enters them electronically, and any pharmacy in the country can pull them up. Any time he wants to get in touch with his primary care doctor, he sends an e-mail message.
All of this is possible because Mr. Danstrup lives in Denmark, a country that began embracing electronic health records and other health care information technology a decade ago.
Adoption of Electronic Health Records in the US
The Centers for Disease Control issues an annual survey on the use of electronic health records in physician’s offices. Last year, partly bolstered by meaningful use incentives in the Affordable Care Act, use grew by 6%. Dr. Elliot King blogs on the EHR increase, noting that:
“In 2011, 57 percent of office-based doctors used electronic medical records/electronic health records (EMR/EHR), according to the CDC. That number compares to the 50.7 percent of physicians’ offices using EMR/EHR’s in 2010 and 48.3 percent in 2009.”
Some physicians are also taking to telemedicine via Skype, FaceTime and other video conferencing services. In Doctors who Skype: Renegades or Heroes?, Jean Riggle looks at the pros and cons of video chat as used by physicians. She notes that there currently aren’t any guidelines for electronic communication between physicians and patients and there there are several important questions yet to be solved:
- How can these chats be integrated into the patient’s medical record?
- Can the actual video be captured and inserted into the record or should a summary of the call suffice?
- How should physicians be reimbursed for the time they spend using social media?
To follow developments in telemedicine, we offer a few sources:
HealthIT.hhs.gov
Federal Health IT programs
American Telemedicine Association
iHelathBeat
Healthcare IT News
