Health Data

Goal of this paper

Tele-Medicine (Tele-Med) also called Tele-Health, needs a formulation of a vision and workplan.

This document tries to reflect on the issues, and make some suggestions.

Introduction

And then there was Corona / COVID-19: improvisations like ‘eHealth over Skype’ (or WhatsApp, Zoom, or . . . ) may have served in the emergency situation with people subject to lockdown or other restrictive measures, but cannot be considered a longer-term solution, if already a solution in the first place.

Instead, the COVID-19 pandemic has demonstrated the need for real Tele-Med:

• The inability of patients, medical personnel and caregivers to meet physically under lock-down
• To protect patients and medical personnel and caregivers against the risks of infecting each other
• To keep ‘light’ and non-COVID-19 patients away from overloaded hospitals and contamination risks
• To avoid unnecessary consumption of Personal Protective Equipment (PPE), that may be scarce

In addition, there are well-known advantages of  Tele-Med:

• Faster response and more frequent consultations, contributing to a higher quality of treatment
• Reduced costs for society (although Tele-Med itself may be adding costs rather than save on costs)

However, the increased costs for the health sector itself have been for long a factor that has weighted negatively on the development and wide-scale application of Tele-Med. Furthermore, industry has not enough aimed for standardization of equipment for use in Tele-Med.

Tele-Med has been developing in areas with low population density and hence transport complications, such as distances and adverse weather conditions, e.g. Norway, Sweden, Scotland, etc.

The COVID-19 pandemic has, however, shown more generally to local authorities and ‘smart cities’ the need to develop Tele-Med solutions for daily use, and not only for epidemic / pandemic, natural and not so natural disaster situations, and transport complications.

 What is required

As a minimum, what is needed is an application

• providing extended video conferencing and imaging capabilities and
• giving access to local equipment at the side of the user /patient (hereafter User), and
• giving sufficient access and control to the health care provider (hereafter Provider)

In more detail:

• A federating application providing Communication and Remote Access to Devices (CRAD-APP),
  • With secure access to the patient health record (EHR), and
  • Controlling a secure person-to...

See discussion and full document in distributed Ledger space HERE.

Malcolm Crompton started a discussion under the title "All or nothing - The false Promise of Anonymity" referring to a paper of N. Walker (2017). This paper is highly relevant to data management in Health Care and the development of an Data Ecosystem in this sector which was discussed in our workshop of 25 Oct 2017.. 

See the Discussion items in the space "Personal Data, Big Data and Ethics"