Dr. Ian McCabe:

Access is key. That remains true. One of the key things is that e-health and telemedicine should be supplementary to the existing person-to-person healthcare. At no point, do we ever want to try to replace physical contact with humans, which is vitally important to healthcare outcomes. To that end, we need harbour infrastructure that is capable of facilitating this older demographic of people and ferry services that are adaptable or frequent enough for healthcare professionals, not just GPs and nurses but physiotherapists, speech and language therapists and occupational therapists, with whom we have been engaging. We are seeking to offer a telemedicine solution but they still need to come to see their patients. They are telling us that they have great difficulties seeing patients on islands because of the logistics of it. They say they either need a dedicated team just for the islands, or they need better ferry and infrastructure to allow them come and go because they see one island patient in the same time period it would take them to see five mainland patients. It is just not feasible for them.

The issue of packages for healthcare professionals would be better answered by Dr. Lineen-Curtis.

On remote monitoring, we are currently conducting a study of hypertension, which is high blood pressure. Our patients are participants who are also hypertension patients. They are issued with a blood pressure monitor they put on their arms at home and press the button. We have software on the phone that will take the blood pressure reading and present it to the cloud. We have all the technical aspects of that. We have the GDPR side of that 90% of the way through. Once the GDPR is cleared, we will be able to take that data and use it not just for remote monitoring but to enable virtual consultations. It is a steep learning curve with GDPR but we are getting there.

We also have capacity for remote monitoring of blood glucose through continuous glucose monitors. With the virtual hospital project, we plan to look at chronic obstructive pulmonary disease, COPD, and heart failure. Dr. Doran will be better able to speak about those.