ABSTRACT
INTRODUCTION: The objective of the present study is to assess the safety and feasibility of the use of telemedicine-based services for surgical wound care and to measure patient satisfaction with telemedicine-based follow-up. MATERIAL AND METHODS: 24 patients were included, they were provided with a corporate mail address. On day 7 after surgery patients sent, via email, an image of their surgical wound together with a completed questionnaire in order to obtain an early diagnosis. Two independent physicians studied this information and the histologic analysis of the specimen. On day 8, all patients underwent face-to-face office examination by a third physician and all of them completed a satisfaction questionnaire at the end of the study. RESULTS: The use of telemedicine-based services showed a sensitivity of 100%, a specificity of 91.6%, a positive predictive value of 75% and a negative predictive value of 100%. Degree of concordance between the two physicians, as regards the necessity of face-to-face follow-up yielded a kappa coefficient of 0.42 (standard error 0.25 and confidence interval 95% (0.92-0.08), which means a moderate agreement between the two evaluations. 94% of patients were satisfied with telemedicine-based follow-up and 93% showed their preference for this procedure over conventional methods. CONCLUSIONS: The telemedicine-based follow-up, has proven to be feasible and safe for the evaluation of early postoperative complications. Patients reported high levels of satisfaction with the procedure. Telemedicine-based follow-up could become standard practice with the development of a specific mobile application.
ABSTRACT
Over the last decade, new hospitals are integrating Information and Communication Technologies (ICTs) in their facilities. Although e-health is a relatively recent term for healthcare practice supported by electronic processes, ubiquitous healthcare monitoring, also known as m-health, is already an emerging research area. Patient monitoring in diverse environments, such as nursing homes or assisted living, are gaining importance. Traditional methods present some problems, as they don't allow enough patient mobility. In this situation, real time transmission of multiple medical data, wearable computing, wireless access in ubiquitous systems and wearable devices for pervasive healthcare can meet the needs of these environments. However, the software and infrastructure deployed in hospitals is not easy to migrate to wireless systems. In some cases, the migration to new technologies can be costly. This paper focuses on the design of a modular, scalable and economical framework to improve the monitoring and checking of patients in different contexts. The challenge is to produce a system to transmit the patient's biomedical data directly to a hospital for monitoring or diagnosis using new communication modules. The modular designed adopted is intended to provide a future-proofed system, whose functionality may be upgraded by modifying the hardware or software. The modules have been validated in different contexts to prove their versatility.
