Highlight of Rendez-Vous 2012 Day 4 would have to be the visit to Lakehead University’s Telemedicine headquarters.

The Ontario Telemedicine Network (OTN) is one of the largest telemedicine networks in the world. Using two-way videoconferencing, OTN provides access to care for patients in every hospital and hundreds of other health care locations across the province. In addition to clinical care, they facilitate the delivery of distance education and meetings for health care professionals and patients.

In relation to distance education the OTN enables teaching and learning at a distance via videoconferencing and webcasting. OTN connects learners to academic centres and other education providers. More than 390,000 health care professionals participate in OTN-facilitated education each year.

Ontario’s OTN is the largest videoconferencing network in the world and is available in telemedicine studios located at more than 1200 sites across the province. Videoconferencing makes it possible for health care professionals to conduct initial and/or follow-up patient consultations, or participate in distance education and meetings. OTN is extending the reach of telemedicine by making it possible for physicians to access videoconferencing from their personal computers.

The presentation at Lakehead University was truly an eye-opener. Monash has a long way to go before getting anywhere near to what I experienced today….AND the government here contributes $20M each year which is dedicated to the OTN. Staggering…..

The possibilities would be endless at Monash if we were set up in this way…not just to enable medical attention to be delivered to rural and remote populations, but to also be set up in such a seemless way so as to enable med students who are located at rural hospitals who more often than not have firewalls in place so communication back to education provider sites is not possible, to be able to save on travel costs associated with having to travel back to sites in order to videoconference into central campus or other RCS campuses.

Ah…..one can dream……goodnight 🙂

Laura

This entry was posted on Saturday, October 13th, 2012 at 2:27 pm and is filed under Conference report. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.