Telemedicine in the form of video or teleconsultation has received a lot of attention since the coronavirus rocked the global healthcare system. It is no longer feasible to do many routine face-to-face consultations for fear of contagion. At the very least healthcare professionals must ask themselves how necessary it is to meet patients in person if there is an alternative.
But for many medical procedures face-to-face is best for both the patient and the clinician or medical student who might be working for that patient’s best outcome.
Ward round in a normal setting
A vital part of patient hospital care is the ward round. This is where medical consultants and their team of doctors, ward nurses, medical students and other healthcare professionals meet with the patient to review clinical details such as presenting complaint and investigation results, check on progress and plan further care. In the ward round, each patient is asked how they are feeling, and their prescription chart and observation chart are reviewed. A team member documents the ward round consultation in the patient notes. At the end of the ward round, the investigations and plans are reviewed and tasks allocated for each patient. The ward round might commence with a team handover, providing an incoming team a summary of key patients needing review or input.
In certain cases a consultant will need collegial support from medical experts, clinical nurses and other healthcare professionals who are remote from the ward or outside the hospital or even on-call at home.
BlueEye Handsfree wearable video for virtual ward round support
BlueEye Handsfree is a unique wearable mobile video platform which supports ward rounds to be attended by several remote healthcare professionals. It consist of a wearable camera worn by the medical team lead and a secure cloud-based video platform.
The real-time video runs on either WiFi or a 4G network and sometimes even 3.5G network can provide the video quality necessary. 5G networks commenced rollout in 2019 and hospitals are slowly getting 5G as part of their infrastructure. 5G is expected to provide seamless viewing experience because of its massive improvements on latency and bandwidth. 5G is projected to provide a 10x decrease in end-to-end latency. The faster speed improves the production of streaming live events on mobile devices. All good news for wearable BlueEye video in healthcare!
The consultant or doctor on the ward round wears BlueEye Handsfree camera near their temple and relays point-of-view video to the cloud-based BlueEye web application. The remote medical team and clinical experts can access the real-time video by logging in to the secure BlueEye web application. BlueEye Handsfree is easy to use, secure and supports multiple device types, browsers and operating systems. It provides one-way video from the ward to the remote medical expert and two-way audio for an interactive team session.
Key Benefits
The key benefits of virtual ward round support is that point-of-view video enables remote medical expert to see the patients from ward doctor’s eyes and it helps expedite patient treatment through access to remote medical collegial expertise. It improves patient outcome and enhances hospital operational efficiency. It avoids contagion risk associated with group of doctors on ward rounds. Finally, it eliminates the need for travel by the remote medical team, resulting in cost and time savings for hospital and staff.
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