Special Session 8 - Telehealth II

The role of telemedicine rose dramatically with the global pandemic, especially the use of videoconferencing technology for medical consults. However telehealth has a much wider scope than video-consults. The Hospital Authority is taking an holistic approach to the development of telehealth, leveraging our unique combination of the Clinical Management System and our single patient app, HA Go, to integrate patient experience with clinical workflow.
This talk will highlight the capabilities already deployed and discuss the future roadmap for telehealth in HA.

During the COVID-19 pandemic, there was an exponential growth in the demand of remote consultation services worldwide to avoid infectious risks between healthcare professionals and patients. Locally, the Hospital Authority has provided large-scale teleconsultation services to COVID-19 confirmed patients. While there is hitherto no standalone statutory legislation in Hong Kong governing the practice of telemedicine, the Medical Council of Hong Kong has published the ‘Ethical Guidelines on Practice of Telemedicine’ in 2019. The Guidelines emphasized, amongst others, that the standard of care delivered by telemedicine must be at all times comparable to conventional in-person consultations and treatments. In order to reduce medico-legal risks, healthcare professionals are reminded to pay due attention to the following common pitfalls:
• Limitations in the absence of direct physical contact with patients
• Safe prescription and dispense medications 
• Keeping medical records and patients’ data protection
• Literacy in digital technology
• Practice licensing requirements in different jurisdictions


In addition, it cannot be overemphasized for the institution to develop robust policy and procedures on patients’ identification, authentication, and consenting process, especially when the practice accepts using remote consultation for first-time patients.

Telemedicine flourished during the COVID 19 pandemic and drew significant attention of the public and health care workers. Telemedicine involves application of innovative technologies in the practice of medicine including tele-consultation, remote clinical imagery system, tele-pharmacy and remote health parameters monitoring. The public sector of the Hong Kong health care system is providing over 90% of total health care service demand, in which outpatient service constitute a significant proportion of service. The implement of teleconsultation service has been proven to be safe and effective in reducing health care resources. Conventionally, medical consultations involve in-person contacts. During COVID 19 when inter-personal interaction was limited because social distancing was the main strategy to control the disease spreading. Medical consultations in such circumstances were conducted without inter-personal contacts. There are several crucial components for the success of teleconsultation. These include: 1. Patient registration to the consulting organization with phone call; 2. Prior to the formal consultation, proper reliable information technology (IT) system should be set up by relevant IT expertise; 3. At the time of formal consultation, nurse should verify patients’ identity; 4. Formal consultation between doctor and patient (comply the medico-legal regulation); 5. Documentations of the information taking during the consultation; 6. Issue certificates or prescriptions; 7. Drug delivery. Upon the release of practice guidelines from the Medical Council of Hong Kong in late 2019, the practice of teleconsultation has gained more acceptance by the health care practitioners. It is no doubt that telemedicine will be the main strategy for the health care system to face the challenges ahead, not only in Hong Kong but also the Greater Bay Area, China.