Mobile app connects islands with GC doctors

A mobile app is being developed to connect rural and remote medical communities in the Pacific islands with specialists from the Gold Coast Hospital in Queensland, Australia.
From September this year, the app will allow doctors in Kirakira in the Solomon Islands, to communicate in real time with specialists about pre and post-operative patient care.
Dr Sophie West, who is presenting her research at the Royal Australasian College of Surgeons Annual Scientific Congress in Brisbane, began developing the idea after building relationships with rural doctors in Kirakira during a medical outreach program in 2014.
“What I noticed was that isolation seemed to be the hardest part of their practice – they had very limited access to peers or specialist medical advice,” Dr West said.
“These two doctors, who were at the same relatively junior stage in their careers as I am now, were responsible for running a hospital servicing 60,000 people, with limited medical resources and access to information.
“If they are unsure how to treat a particular condition, the patient may have to embark on a long and costly journey to the national referral hospital in Honiara to get specialist advice.
“We are developing this app so that rural and remote doctors can access specialist advice, which will hopefully improve patient care and contribute to rural doctors’ professional development and their sense of being part of the wider medical community.
Dr West says there are already medical applications available, such as Figure 1; however there are ethical concerns about protecting patient privacy, especially among patients who may not be technologically literate.
“Existing apps are often like the Instagram of medicine, and they are a great learning resource for doctors because anyone can access them, but they don’t do a very good job of protecting patient privacy or interaction with patient care,” she says.
“The law needs to catch up, because there are several new areas of electronic consultation which need ethical consideration – for example who is ultimately responsible for the patient’s care when e-consultation is occurring?
“At the moment it is generally agreed that the clinician physically delivering the care is ultimately responsible, however we need to ‘innovate cautiously’, because the risk of doing harm in medicine is far greater than when there is innovation in other fields.”
Doctor interaction with the AUSPAC e-consult app will be assessed to determine whether users are benefiting from the app, and if advice has actually improved patient care. It is hoped the app will also be trialled in Papua New Guinea, Fiji, Vanuatu and Tonga