A program that delivers specialist eye care to remote areas of Australia has looked to the skies for its next step. The award-winning Remote-I program uses satellite services from the National Broadband Network (NBN) Co. to take the low-cost eye screening to more Australians.
The tele-eye care program developed by the CSIRO is aimed largely at helping indigenous and older Australians living in regional and remote areas.
It received an injection of almost $2 million from the Federal Department of Health and Ageing and the CSIRO’s Digital Productivity and Services Flagship in May.
The new funding is being used for a trial of the satellite-based program, with the initial sites in the Goldfields-Esperance and Greater South Coast regions in WA and Torres Strait Islands in Queensland. There will be a total of 900 patients, with 300 at each site.
It runs from seven locations, including community health centres and aged-care facilities.
Trained health workers undertake the screenings, looking for diseases such as diabetic retinopathy, which can lead to vision loss or total blindness, and trachoma.
There will also be a mobile caravan with an eye camera and laptop that will enable health workers to screen patients in remote areas and then upload retinal images from the Remote-I system when they return to a medical hub with a satellite broadband connection.
The images are examined by city-based ophthalmologists.
Yogesan Kanagasingam, research director of the Australian e-Health Research Centre, said the satellite coverage would enable access to areas that currently had no telephone coverage and therefore no tele-medicine.
“Our target is to reach extremely remote areas,” he said.
The trial will evaluate whether satellite technology is suitable for tele-ophthalmology. Issues such as high resolution of images and the speed and reliability of signal transmission will be examined.
CSIRO is working with the WA Health Department’s Country Health Service and Indigenous and Remote Eye Health Service of the Australian Society of Ophthalmologists for the trial.
Professor Kanagasingam said the second phase, after six months, would involve new automated technology to give feedback to the health workers undertaking the screening about which patients had eye disease and its severity.
This would help primary care providers to decide who to refer immediately for specialist treatment and who could wait for a visiting ophthalmologist.
The automated program developed by the CSIRO was already being trialled in China, in Guangdong Province, with more than 1000 patients a day.
“They are putting our entire system into their hospitals in the rural areas,” he said. “It is the future of eye care delivery in the world because the number of ophthalmologists is not adequate to cater for the population increase.”
Local ophthalmology researcher has a vision for all primary-school children to undergo regular testing.
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