The Department of Veterans Affairs is rolling out a pilot telehealth program that would use tablets and cloud services from AWS GovCloud to treat patients with non-healing wounds, which costs the U.S. nearly $50 billion each year, according to a VA blog post.
Two percent of veterans with non-healing wounds are plagued with mobility issues, which make visiting a physician's office or hospital difficult. With the telehealth program, 3-D sensors and computer visioning software conveniently capture high-resolution images and measure patients' wounds remotely.
"The really great thing about this is that in the past, doctors would have to visually estimate whether a wound has improved based on memory of a past image, which can sometimes be confusing when you also have to remember other patient images as well," said Kevin Broder, MD, project director for VA's Wound Image Capture and Storage Innovation. "This tablet provides recorded, accurate data to track progress."
Healthcare providers are also able to send the photos and data to the cloud, saving processing time for images and data, as well as eliminating the need for medical professionals to dedicate time outside of the appointment to uploading and inputting information.
The software could save millions of dollars in healthcare costs, since the tablets cost significantly less — and are much more portable — than the telemedicine carts that were previously used for similar care delivery.