A telemedicine model for integrating point-of-care testing into a distributed health-care environment.
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Date
2002-09-09
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Abstract
Centralized testing demands costly laboratories which are inefficient and may provide poor services Recent advances make it feasible to move clinical testing nearer to patients and the requesting physicians thus reducing the time to treatment Internet technologies can be used to create a virtual laboratory information system in a distributed health care environment This allows clinical testing to be transferred to a cooperative scheme of several point of care testing POCT nodes Two pilot virtual laboratories were established one in Italy AUSL Modena and one in Greece Athens Medical Centre They were constructed on a three layer model to allow both technical and clinical verification Different POCT devices were connected The pilot sites produced good preliminary results in relation to user acceptance efficiency convenience and costs Decentralized laboratories can be expected to become cost effective