Telereferral for Cardiology

This service is available for: Syddanmark, Timisoara

This service allows a cardiologist based on a General or Tertiary Hospital to assist a General Practitioner or a highly trained nurse to conduct diagnostic exams and more specifically an echocardiography on a patient.
This requires both the simultaneous presence of the cardiologist next to a video-conferencing workstation in case of questions arising during the session and of the healthcare professional who conducts the examination next to the patient and a broadband network which can transmit animated images.
The virtual referral can be highly interactive because the cardiologist can instruct the healthcare professional who is conducting the exam about where to position the echocardiographer probe and how to move it around. In practice, as is the case at the Danish site, the nurse eventually acquire so much expertise in conducting the exam that she can move the probe and even give some preliminary indications based on the images even without the presence of the cardiologist.
This type of Virtual Referral can be performed on patients who show anomalies in their ECG that point to heart diseases such as:
- ischemic heart disease
- dyspnoea
- heart failure
- murmurs
- syncope
- hypertension
The interest of replacing traditional referrals with virtual ones is that a timely decision can be taken about the action to perform and, if a transfer to a hospital is necessary, the most suitable hospital (clinical competence, availability of clinical staffs and intensive care beds, etc.) to handle the type of disease detected can be selected on the spot. The value of this service is of course enormous for isolated communities with no cardiologists in easy reach and has been made possible from the appearance on the market of portable and reasonably priced echo-cardiographers.