Continuity of care is a problem when thousands of volunteer medical relief groups offer care to patients and assistance to understaffed medical teams in remote underdeveloped and rural locations worldwide. Blake Fechtel MD, and PhD student at Mayo Clinic is working in a poor and secluded area of Honduras conducting a 13 month study on the use of telemedicine and how it can be used to maintain a relationship with remote patients. Fechtel reports that medical conditions are substandard in rural Honduras simply because there isn’t the financial infrastructure to provide needed health services. To do the study, he works in a temporary clinic with two volunteer in-house physicians. These physicians typically see more than 300 patients in five hours. The relief teams help the situation, but unfortunately they can’t stay long.
Fechtel and his advisor, Bart Demaerschalk MD, the Director for the Mayo Clinic Telestroke and Teleneurology program, presented their initial findings from this program involving the use of telemedicine at the ATA meeting held May 5-7 in Austin Texas.
Fechtel’s project “Satellite-Supplementation of Medical Outreach Clinics,” uses a very small aperture terminal satellite internet to connect with volunteer physicians in the U.S. to examine patients via teleconference in clinics run by Global Brigades in rural Honduras. The study involving 445 patients will produce insight into healthcare issues in isolated areas and outline the obstacles to providing telemedicine services.
Fechtel says, “That despite some challenges, the feedback from patients who were seen in the initial phase of the study have been positive. Even though some of the patients have never even seen a computer, they love it”.