GP practices in European nation area unit presently making an attempt to fill their vacancies with foreign doctors from France, FRG and Italian Republic, however this can be not a long strategy, and over time the availability of qualified GPs can still lessen. The health care trade has so set to pilot a replacement approach, known as netCare, that permits the supply of telemedicine services in pharmacies.
netCare is that the results of a collaboration between pharmaSuisse (Switzerland’s association of pharmacists), Medgate (Switzerland’s centre for telemedicine), and also the medical and accident nondepository financial institution Helsana. With the assistance of Cisco and communications supplier Swisscom, they need equipped two hundred pharmacies in European nation with Cisco TelePresence video communication systems.
At the Cisco Live conference in London on, Cisco’s top dog for European nation Eric Waltert explained that pharmacists in his country area unit educated to an equivalent level as GPs, however they’re not allowed to sell bound medications while not prescription.
Using the new TelePresence systems – that accommodates a Cisco EX90 system equipped with a mike, a camera associated a 24-inch full-HD show – patients will receive an initial consultation (triage) with a medical practitioner over a video link at a pharmacy.
When a patient enters the pharmacy, they’re initial assessed by the chemist mistreatment one in every of twenty “algorithms” developed by Medgate. These algorithms area unit effectively flow charts for various medical conditions – like back pain, inflammation, or a bladder infection – providing a awfully structured method for identification the matter.
The patient then goes into a video consultation with one in every of seventy Medgate doctors. so as to safeguard patient privacy, medical examinations happen in an exceedingly separate medical institution, and Cisco’s TelePresence system offers secure information transmission.
Medgate has over twelve years of expertise providing health care recommendation over the phone, however the telepresence systems mean that it will currently rescale its service to the next level of interaction.
The medical practitioner and patient will currently see and listen to one another as if they were sitting within the same space. For the patient, the expertise is like visiting the medical practitioner in-person, and for the medical practitioner it’s straightforward to form a visible assessment of the patient’s issues.