Clinicians' and Patients' Experiences and Satisfaction with Unscheduled, Nighttime, Internet-based Video Conferencing for Assessing Acute Medical Problems in a Nursing Facility

Videoconferencing between patients and their physicians can increase patients' access to healthcare. Unscheduled videoconferencing can benefit patients with acute medical problems but has not been studied extensively. We conducted a clinical trial of unscheduled, nighttime videoconferencing in a nursing home, where on-call physicians usually provide care by telephone from remote locations. Although most calls for medical problems did not lead to videoconferencing, physicians and nursing-home residents were satisfied with videoconferencing when it did occur, and physicians reported that making medical decisions was easier with videoconferencing. Videoconferencing was most often conducted to assess residents with changes in mental status, abnormal laboratory values, or falls. Physicians often lacked immediate access to videoconferencing equipment when medical problems with residents occurred. This application could benefit from improved access and portability of equipment.

[1]  C H Chi,et al.  Emergency department-based telemedicine. , 1999, The American journal of emergency medicine.

[2]  et al.,et al.  The Regenstrief Medical Record System: a quarter century experience , 1999, Int. J. Medical Informatics.

[3]  Guillermo Gutierrez,et al.  Medicare, the Internet, and the future of telemedicine , 2001, Critical care medicine.

[4]  E. Pfeiffer.  A Short Portable Mental Status Questionnaire for the Assessment of Organic Brain Deficit in Elderly Patients † , 1975, Journal of the American Geriatrics Society.

[5]  R. Shih,et al.  Telemedicine in the emergency department: a randomized controlled trial , 1999, Journal of telemedicine and telecare.

[6]  Stefan Sävenstedt,et al.  Nurse–doctor interaction in teleconsultations between a hospital and a geriatric nursing home , 2002, Journal of telemedicine and telecare.

[7]  Yan Xiao,et al.  Mobile Telemedicine Testbed , 1997, AMIA.

[8]  M. Breslow,et al.  ICU telemedicine. Organization and communication. , 2000, Critical care clinics.

[9]  T R Lieder.  Telemedicine company brings ICU patients to the physician. , 2000, American journal of health-system pharmacy : AJHP : official journal of the American Society of Health-System Pharmacists.

[10]  M T Arredondo,et al.  User satisfaction with home telecare based on broadband communication , 2002, Journal of telemedicine and telecare.

[11]  Shigeru Ohta,et al.  A Health Monitoring System for Elderly People Living Alone , 2002, Journal of telemedicine and telecare.

[12]  Charles R Doarn,et al.  Teleconsultation practice guidelines: report from G8 Global Health Applications Subproject 4. , 2002, Telemedicine journal and e-health : the official journal of the American Telemedicine Association.

[13]  E. Lemaire,et al.  Low-bandwidth, Internet-based videoconferencing for physical rehabilitation consultations , 2001, Journal of telemedicine and telecare.

[14]  Gunther Schadow,et al.  A FreeBSD-Based Low-Cost Broadband VPN Router for a Telemedicine Application , 2002, BSDCon.

[15]  Michael Weiner,et al.  Secure Internet video conferencing for assessing acute medical problems in a nursing facility , 2001, AMIA.

[16]  E. Hui,et al.  The role of telenursing in the provision of geriatric outreach services to residential homes in Hong Kong , 2001, Journal of telemedicine and telecare.

[17]  C J McDonald,et al.  The Medical Gopher--a microcomputer system to help find, organize and decide about patient data. , 1986, The Western journal of medicine.

[18]  Jonathan D. Linkous.  Telemedicine: an overview. , 1999, Health devices.

[19]  R. Bratton,et al.  Patient satisfaction with telemedicine: A comparison study of geriatric patients , 2001, Journal of telemedicine and telecare.

[20]  Deborah R Dakins.  Home is where the healthcare is. , 2002, Telemedicine today.

[21]  P. Couturier,et al.  Telesurveillance of elderly patients by use of passive infra-red sensors in a 'smart' room , 2003, Journal of telemedicine and telecare.

[22]  Paul Miller,et al.  Evaluating telemedicine in an accident and emergency setting , 2001, Comput. Methods Programs Biomed..

[23]  Michael Weiner,et al.  Conducting a study of Internet-based video conferencing for assessing acute medical problems in a nursing facility , 2002, AMIA.

[24]  E. Krupinski,et al.  Chapter 2: Clinical applications in telemedicine/telehealth , 2002 .

[25]  Hiroshi Tanaka,et al.  Telemedical support using real-time ultrasonography and endoscopy images , 2001, Comput. Methods Programs Biomed..

[26]  A. Norris,et al.  Essentials of Telemedicine and Telecare , 2001 .

[27]  Sean Maher,et al.  The clinical achievements of a geriatric telehealth project in its first year , 2002, Journal of telemedicine and telecare.