Pharmacy Daily | Weekly Comment
21 May 18

THIS week's contribution is from Centaine Snoswell, Pharmacy and PhD Candidate, University of Queensland: What's happening with telehealth - I recently attended the American Telehealth Association conference in Chicago, which was very interesting and informative. What is telehealth you ask? Telehealth, telemedicine, digital health, online health, eHealth, mHealth are all terms you might have heard. They are often thrown around with the words 'emerging technologies' and 'innovation'. Telehealth (let's use one term from now on) has been around for a long time. Early last century you could talk to a GP over the two-way radio, then we had the telephone, and now we have video-conference, store-and-forward, mobile health, and remote monitoring, most of which have asynchronous or synchronous versions. The hot topics now are artificial intelligence and its potential to accurately predict medical events in advance, and virtual reality for immersive experiences to assist with clinician training and patient cognitive behavioural therapy. If there's a technology, someone is trying to use it to improve the health and wellbeing of the population. Some pharmacy examples include patients sending script requests via smartphone apps (mHealth), and patients sending pictures of scripts or medications to be filled (store-and-forward). If you are interested in telehealth, consider attending the Australasian Telehealth Society's Successes and Failures in Telehealth conference in October this year in Darwin.