The E-health Revolution
Interview with Professor Peter Yellowlees
Director: Centre for Online Health, University of Qld
Professor of Community Mental Health:
Department of Psychiatry, The University
of Queensland
Visiting Medical Officer:
Division of Mental Health Services, Royal Brisbane Hospital
Health Service District
The following interview was conducted between Professor
Peter Yellowlees
and
Assistant Editor & Roving Reporter
TelehealthNet News Bob Pyke, Jr. RN, CPNP
Would you tell us about your new adventure?
I am involved in a number
of projects at the present time. Perhaps the one that is attracting
the most
interest is the use of immersive virtual reality to demonstrate and describe
the experience of psychosis. I am working with a number of researchers
at the University of Queensland to use supercomputer powered visualization
environments that allow you to literally walk into a room and be surrounded
by visual and auditory hallucinations, as if you were psychotic and suffering
from an illness like severe depression, schizophrenia or a drug related
disorder.
Apart from this, I am also involved with a number of projects
using high-powered search engines and neural network technologies for
the diagnosis of a
number
of medical and psychiatric disorders. These technologies are used to analyze
human facial expressions, languages and movement and then to classify
diagnostically in an automated way. Ultimately these types of technologies
will be able
to be used at a distance so you will be able to sit down in front of your
videoconferencing screen for example, and after a 10 or 15 minute interview,
be sent an automated diagnosis, just as if you are sitting talking to
a doctor.
The third area of interest for me, from a research perspective,
concerns email consultation. I am involved with a number of groups
working on this, looking
at the clinical guidelines and requirements, and developing websites to
support this type of approach. Email consultations can be seen to be a
part of e-disease management, at a broader level, and I think this
is one of
the areas that telemedicine will move into very rapidly.
My final area of interest, in the commercial sector now, is in a
company called Health Share (www.healthshare.com.au).
Here we have developed some quite
remarkably impressive software technology that allows doctors to videoconference
with each other over broadband Internet, ideally using virtual private
networks, but at the same time to share any applications, data or Internet
access that is available at any of the networked computers at that
time. I believe
that Health Share’s technology has the potential to really revolutionise
the way we deliver health care and this technology is now being bought
by quite a number of doctors here in Australia, and will hopefully become
increasingly
available globally in the not too distant future.
Where can we locate
your site?
There are 2 sites of importance. The first is the University
site at (www.coh.uq.edu.au), where a large amount of information
on e-health is maintained as well as research and media reports from our research at the Centre for Online Health and a number of PowerPoint presentations that members of the Centre have given in recent times. The second site is the Health Share site at (www.healthshare.com.au), where in particular there is a 2-minute video that demonstrates the quite remarkable Health Share technology.
What are your target audiences?
I am basically interested in creating new and high quality approaches
to care for both patients, particularly those with chronic illnesses,
and health care providers. As a psychiatrist, I have a natural bias
towards the psychiatric disorders, which of course have always been
well supported in the telemedicine community. I have recently co-edited
a book called Telepsychiatry and e-Mental Health which is published
by the Royal Society of Medicine (www.rsm.ac.uk), and which I think
is a good example of a state of the art publication looking at the
many important clinical and research issues involved in that field.
Are these an extension of our telemedicine work?
That is certainly the case. I am still involved with providing consultations
over the Queensland Telemedicine Network, for instance, and the Centre for
Online Health manages a large telepaediatric project which has just completed
its first 1,000 paediatric consultations. At a personal level, however,
my interests have really moved on and I am focussing on the use of the Internet
environment, high bandwidth networks and new computer technologies as I
see e-health becoming a core long-term part of the health system in the
next 20 or 30 years. I think that the work in conventional telemedicine
that I have been involved in, since 1992, has been extremely useful and
has led to me having a much greater understanding and interest in e-health
generally, particularly in terms of change management and user adoption
issues, but I do not see the use of the old big black boxes as being the
way of the future.
What other interests have you developed?
One of the major areas I find fascinating is the whole concept of
consumerism. I recently had a book published called Your Guide to e-Health – Third
Millennium Medicine on the Internet by the University of Qld Press (www.uqp.uq.edu.au).
This book is essentially a consumer guide or cookbook on the use of the
Internet for e-health and I am pleased to say it is now in its second
print run and has proved very popular. It has a comprehensive list of
good websites for different medical and psychiatric disorders, but the
issue that quite a number of patients have commented on that they have
found very valuable has been the “how to” guide to performing searches
for high quality health literature.
What is your prognosis for telemedicine?
My prognosis for telemedicine, as a term, is very poor in that I think
it is unfortunately a rather outdated terminology that does not embrace
the breadth that is e-health. I must say I tend to prefer the term “e-health,” which
was recently defined by Gunther Eysenbach, the editor of the Journal
of Medical Internet Research 1 as follows:
“e-health is an emerging field in the intersection of medical informatics,
public health and business, referring to health services and information
delivered or enhanced through the Internet and related technologies.
In a broader sense, the term characterises not only a technical development,
but also a state-of-mind, a way of thinking, an attitude, and a commitment
for networked, global thinking, to improve health care locally, regionally,
and worldwide by using information and communication technology.”
Using this definition I think is much more sensible than the term “telemedicine” because
it embraces attitudes and healthcare processes, rather than just technology,
which tends to be how people view telemedicine. My view on the future
of e-health is extremely bright. Australia in particular is now taking up
this form of
care quite widely, and there are a number of exciting e-health programs
being introduced providing care at a distance. Naturally these are most effective
when used for chronic conditions such as diabetes, asthma, depression,
and
for prevention or assessment in highly visual specialties such as dermatology
and ophthalmology. So overall, I am very optimistic about the future
and see e-health as an area of growing interest, but one that needs to be
underpinned
by high quality research and evaluation as occurs at the Centre for Online
Health here in Australia.
About Dr. Yellowlees
Professor Peter Yellowlees
Qualifications(s): MD BSc MB BS FRANZCP
MRC (Psych)
MAPsS MRACMA
Professor Peter Yellowlees is the Director of the University
of Queensland’s Centre for Online Health where he is developing an extensive and innovative research program. He is also Professor of Community Mental Health in the University of Queensland’s
Department of Psychiatry and a visiting Medical Officer for the Division
of Mental Health Services at the Royal Brisbane Hospital Health Service
District. He has a BSc from the University of London, and an MBBS from
the Royal Free Hospital School of Medicine; he completed an MD at Flinders
University of South Australia, and is a member of FRANZCP, MRC (Psych),
MAPsS and MRACMA. He has worked in the e-health space for a decade and
has an international reputation as a researcher, speaker and innovator,
having published about 140 articles and four books, many of them in this
topic area. He is internationally renowned for his expertise in research
and teaching in e-Health and futuristic health systems, and has gained
over $5 million in funding for his projects since 1995. He has interests
in two e-health companies and was a member of the Federal Governments
Electronic Health Records Taskforce.
Reference
1.
Eysenbach, G. What is e-health? Journal of Medical Internet Research, 2001;
3(2):e20
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