Pretoria - During the Covid-19 pandemic, it was no longer possible for doctors to consult with patients in person as they would have normally done.
Precautions to meeting up with people had to be implemented, said Dr Katekani Khosa, a Sefako Makgatho Health Sciences University graduate serving as a medical officer at 1 Military Hospital in Pretoria.
The Limpopo-born medical practitioner said the industry had to come up with the tele-medicine concept in order to continue rendering services during unusual circumstances.
“This was to ensure we could continue with patient care, but in a safe environment,” he said. “So what we do is tele-health, a safe medical consultation with patients. This is more of an innovation with which we are able to continue meeting up with patients even if we are not in the same place.
“Medicine is evolving, so we need to make people aware that we can still consult with you even if you are far from us; we are able to go to where you are as long as technology is involved. This is a technological advancement to medicine.”
Tele-medicine refers to caring for patients remotely when the provider and patient are not physically present with each other. It is a way of delivering medical treatment over the internet, usually through video chat.
This technology has several advantages for both patients and health-care providers, according to Khosa.
“For example, a patient has a video conference appointment from their home or from a regional hospital, directly to a specialist at a main city hospital,” he said.
“Tele-health can be delivered by using the simple telephone, also by sharing information digitally.”
Khosa said the service was not designed to prevent all travel to a specialist, but could be extremely useful for a range of appointments where one-on-one consultation was not possible.
He said research showed that assessments and diagnostics performed via tele-habilitation were equivalent to in-person services, and the treatment outcomes were not inferior to traditional services.
Regarding the belief that older people don’t like video consultations, he said: “Well, contrary to what most people expect, older people really do like this form of consultation.
“Quite apart from the fact that they don’t have to travel and get tired going to see the specialist, they find this a really comfortable way of interacting with a health professional.
“When you have well co-ordinated services between two sites, then we’ve found that actually, you take less time to manage patients, patients need fewer sessions and the duration of time that you’re seeing patients for a session is less, and this results in more time efficiencies for the patient and also cost savings for the health services – and overall more costumer and clinician satisfaction.”
Khosa added that the service had become cheaper in that one no longer required expensive hardware to participate in a tele-health consultation.
“In many cases, a smartphone with reasonable camera and internet connection can be used for a video consultation, or to share clinical information,” he said.
“Tele-health has many benefits and is used more and more all over the world.”
Pretoria News