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Imagine living two hours outside of Ottawa and hearing from your specialist that you need to travel there for surgery because your kind of procedure just isn’t done around here. The time away from work, that long drive there and back, the parking and the uncertainty of what all this will mean in your life would be pretty stressful.

Thanks to a couple of leading-edge doctors, Pembroke Regional Hospital’s Dr. Scott Murray and The Ottawa Hospital’s Dr. Brian Blew, when that news is given to urology patients requiring subspecialty surgery in Ottawa, the surgical consultation can all be done using Telemedicine.

Patients complete their imaging, such as CT scan, blood work, and initial consult in Pembroke and Dr. Blew gets access to the results. Dr. Blew then connects to Pembroke using traditional telemedicine…

…but that’s where the ordinary stops. 

Dr. Blew plugs in the Picture Archiving and Communication  System (PACS) viewer and his iPad to the videoconferencing system then provides a complete review of the patient’s images and draws their upcoming surgical procedure on his iPad, all while the patient sits comfortably in their home community with their support person and the telemedicine nurse from Pembroke.

After the patient’s surgery has been completed, the two-hour drive can again be avoided by using telemedicine for their five-minute post-op visit.

It’s clean, it’s green, it’s private, and it works!

Paula Archambault, RN, BScN
Clinical Telemedicine Program Coordinator
The Ottawa Hospital

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