2010-07 - Korea IT Times

U-health
The Road Ahead -
What is the Ubiquitous Hospital?
Traditional Healthcare means Hospital
Healthcare, which is near-place healthcare
to in-person patients. That is, the Healthcare
that was and is confined to spatiotemporal
boundaries. Pain is Guilt? Care at a
distance, or in-absentia care, was conducted
via post. Thanks to telecommunication
technologies, Telemedicine (maybe in a
narrow sense) has extended healthcare to
far-place patients and has been most beneficial
for populations living in isolated
communities and remote regions. To
some extent, Tele-medical Healthcare has
somewhat overcome the space limitation
of Hospital Healthcare.
Some say Telemedicine in a broad sense
refers to the use of communications and
information technologies for the delivery
of clinical and medical care. In other
words, Telemedicine may postulate two
healthcare providers or professionals
called physicians or clinicians, discussing a
case over the telephone or videoconferencing
equipment to conduct a real-time consultation
between medical specialists in
two different areas. And it means a clinical
medicine where medical data is transferred
through interactive audiovisual media
for consulting and remote medical examinations.
The three main methodological procedures
of Telemedicine, in a wide sense, are
store-and-forward, remote monitoring and
36 KOREA IT TIMES | July 2010
Kim Hak-dong, Director of Mobicomm Inc. And
KW U-Globe Corp. and Director of Gana Animal
Hospital
interactive telemedical healthcare.
Store-and-forward telemedicine involves
acquiring clinical or medical data,
such as medical images, vital signs etc.
and then transmitting this data to a physician
or medical specialist at a convenient
time for asynchronous assessment. A difference
between traditional in-person and
telemedical healthcare is the presence of
both parties at the same time. Dermatology,
radiology and pathology are conducive
to asynchronous telemedicine.
Remote monitoring enables physicians
or medical professionals to monitor a pa-
By Kim Hak-dong/ m57102637@korea.com
tient remotely, using various medical devices.
This method is primarily used for
managing chronic diseases or specific conditions,
such as heart disease, diabetes
mellitus or asthma. These services can
provide comparable healthcare outcomes
to traditional in-person patient, supply
greater satisfaction to patients and may be
cost-effective.
Interactive telemedicine services or
telemedical healthcare provide real-time
interactions between a patient and healthcare-providers,
including phone conversations,
online communication and home
visits. Many-sided activities such as history
review, vital signal examination, and
psychiatric evaluations can be conducted
to those in traditional face-to-face treatment.
So, "interactive" telemedicine services
may be less costly than in-person
clinical visits.
Strictly speaking, we'd better use
telemedicine and telemedical healthcare
differently, for healthcare is the service of
providing medical or clinical care. The
terms tele-health, tele-consultation or e-
healthcare are at times wrongly interchanged
with telemedicine or telemedical
healthcare. Like the terms "medicine" and
"healthcare," telemedicine often refers only
to clinical and medical activities while
the term tele-health can refer to clinical
and non-clinical services such as medical