Marshalls benefits

from cyber medicine

By Giff Johnson

ACCESS to an Internet-based medical consulting program is saving the Marshall Islands tens of thousands of dollars in costly off-island referrals and improving the quality of treatment for patients at Majuro Hospital, according to doctors in Majuro.

The "tele-medicine” program links the Marshalls through the Internet with the Pacific Islands Healthcare Project at the US Army Tripler Hospital in Honolulu.

The north Pacific islands of Palau, Yap, Chuuk and Pohnpei are also participat ing in the physician network. Besides the considerable cost savings, the tele med system has given a tremendous boost to once-isolated physicians working in the islands.

"It allows us to consult with many medical specialists (in the Tripler system),” said Dr. Kama! Gunawardane, Majuro Hospital’s surgeon. "We’ve received very helpful advice and recommendations for managing patients”.

During 1998, Majuro Hospital doctors went "on-line” through the tele-med program to get consultations on more than 40 local patients, according to Gunawardane.

The tele-med program was launched more than a year ago by the Pacific Basin Medical Officers Association, which gained donations of equipment for the islands, in co-operation with Tripler Hospital, which operates a web site to serve hospitals in the US-affiliated islands.

Non-emergency cases that have graduate medical education value for Tripler have been sent to the Honolulu hospital at no cost to the Marshalls.

About 17 patients have received free treatment through these referrals to date.

Gunawardane said that on one patient alone, the hospital saved about $30,000 in treatment costs.

In one particularly difficult surgery case, involving a complicated skin graft, Gunawardane was able to get advice of plastic surgeons and other specialist surgeons - specialists who are not available locally - in the Tripler system that helped him to decide the best way to handle the unusual procedure.

But it isn’t just the Marshalls that is gaining benefits from the tele-med pro gram. It helps the Marshalls to get good medical advice and a number of med ical referrals for no cost, while Tripler gets the benefit of treating health prob lems that its doctors would not ordinarily see, he said. "The program benefits both sides,” Gunwardane said.

Direct medical benefits aside, use of the Internet to communicate with Tripler doctors is saving Majuro Hospital thousands of dollars each month in long dis tance phone calls, Gunawardane said. One reason that Marshalls’ doctors have been able to get such good advice is that they have the equipment - a scanner, digital camera, and a machine that can take pictures of the inner ear and eye - to transmit high quality photographs and x-rays through the Internet, so that doctors at Tripler can see the problems the Majuro doctors are describing in their notes. 'We’re not professionally isolated anymore,” Gunawardane said. "It gives us a tremendous boost to get these comments and observations from outside doctors”. ■