Research

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Meet Dr Anthony Smith

Anthony Smith COHImagine using technology to give sick kids living in some of Queensland’s most remote areas access to the same expert care as children living in Brisbane.

That’s the vision of Dr Anthony Smith and his team of researchers at the Centre of On-line Health at the Royal Children’s Hospital.

For the past ten years, the Centre for Online Health – an internationally recognised pioneer in telemedicine – has broken new ground in the use of telehealth to bring specialist paediatric services to regional Queensland. It is now one of the largest reported examples of paediatric telemedicine (telepaediatrics) services in the world.

“All kids should have access to the best available health care, no matter where they live,” said Dr Smith. “And we’re proud to help make that happen.”

Since the centre began this work, more than 8500 telehealth consultations in 37 paediatric subspecialties, such as burns and cardiology, have been conducted for more than 3000 regional families, saving them countless hours and kilometres in travel to Brisbane.

“We’re pleased with our achievements so far... The Health-e-Screen4Kids project is providing mobile health services throughout a remote indigenous community; the home telemedicine links are helping families keep in touch with specialists at the RCH and the ‘robots’ are on-call 24h a day to deliver specialist consultations at the bedside in regional hospitals. But there are so many more families we can help.”

With your generous support we can continue to develop and investigate novel telemedicine applications which have real emotional, economic and health benefits for families living in regional and remote areas.
 

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