As many of you know I’m very interested in the whole area of using technology to improve the quality healthcare. We have covered many different varieties of social media over the last couple of years. You can see a few topics here.

Telemedicine Image courtesy of imagerymajestic at FreeDigitalPhotos.net

In the last few months the subject of telemedicine has reared its head. Whether ugly or not remains to be seen. Telemedicine being defined as “is the use of telecommunication and information technologies in order to provide clinical health care at a distance. It helps eliminate distance barriers and can improve access to medical services that would often not be consistently available in distant rural communities” according to our friends at Wikipedia.

So I was very interested in a report from the UK government which has just come out. The report is entitled “Evaluation of the Telephone Support Psychological Wellbeing and Work Feasibility Pilot”. You can read a summary here. Though I have to say it is one of the worst written documents I have ever cast my eyes over. Which bureaucrats can’t write comprehensible English beats me.

Anyhow the evaluation of the ‘Telephone Support’ intervention which hopes to improve employment and health prospects for people with mental health conditions was on the main pretty positive and further trials are recommended.

So what do you think?

It would be great if you would consider using the comments sections below.

You might want to consider the following questions:-

a) Have you ever used Telemedicine? If so for what reason?
b) How effective was it?
c) Would you recommended it to others?
d) If you have not tried it would you consider doing so?
e) Is telemedicine privatization by the back door?
f) Overall what is your view of telemedicine?

Many thanks in advance