Telemedicine Expands its Field of Activity

The experience of macro- and microscopy telemedicine organized by the Republican center of pathology anatomy will be expanded to the entire system of healthcare.

The Ministry of Health plans to furnish all medical and preventive establishments of the country with telemedicine system.

There have been several attempts on setting up telemedicine systems, but the most actively operating one however, is the one installed at the Republican pathology anatomy center.

The essence of its work is in that the sender prepares 4-5 microns thick tissue sections, stained with histological dyes, from operational and distant organs, puts it under microscope, finds areas which need advice, and sends by Internet more than 30 microscopic images of different fields to a consultant’s monitor. Each of them is magnified, which makes it possible to identify pathological processes and diagnose a case. The consultant receives a telemedicine consultation protocol, which specifies the patient’s full name, clinical diagnosis, medical history, and diagnosis of the doctor who submitted material for consultation.

Analyzing the operation of the system deputy minister of healthcare Asylbek Khudoyarov noted in his article published in the “Medical journal of Uzbekistan” the advantages of introduction of information-communication technologies to practical healthcare.

“It was established in analyzing the operation of the telemedicine system that because of complexity of diagnosing there has been no preliminary diagnosing in 17% of cases. In 8,2% of case the regional and district doctors had difficulties in making an accurate diagnosis: they had several optional answers. Percentage of discrepancy between the preliminary and final diagnosis made up 13.2% , while at the initial stage of work the discrepancy reached up to 40%. Therefore, the level of knowledge of doctors from periphery increased in the process of on-line consultations and discussions.

The majority of sent biopsies belonged to the highest category of complexity: different types of tumors accounted for 68% (including benign - 1.4%, cancer - 30.9%, Kaposi - 5.7%). Pre-cancerous processes were observed in 10.1% of cases.

Patients advised with the help of telemedicine, were in their active working age; they made up - 58.3%; children under the age of 14 accounted for 38.7%.

Introduction of macro- and micro telemedicine system into the healthcare with the aim of diagnosing diseases enable to conduct it on the basis of remote training of young specialists.

Hence, a database has been created with the help of telemedicine system for diagnosing, choosing the tactics of therapy, and specifying additional examinations and research. This made it possible to use it for remote training of personnel. 

Source: Jahonnews.uz