A Telemedicine Gift of Validation

The great news of our recent philanthropic gift from Bell Canada to our Foundation and its Telemedicine campaign is especially exciting for me. It validates fourteen years of work, often intensive, devoted to this fabulous method of delivering healthcare.

I can’t help but reminisce on the days in the mid-nineties when my buddy Dr. Ed Lemaire and I were conjuring up visions of delivering care through videoconferencing. But in those days we were working with 56K modems, on a web browser called Netscape (Explorer wasn’t even around then) and postage stamp size video on NetMeeting.

Clients loved it! And thankfully we had a couple of prosthetic and orthotic specialists who realized how important it was to the clients, and compromised their usual routines to accommodate this primitive technology.

During the fourteen years I’ve traveled across Canada and into the U.S. to share the stories of our growing list of small victories in Telehealth at the Royal. I’ve seen much evidence of its success in other provinces, well ahead of Ontario until recently. We’re now seeing more research that validates the effectiveness of telemedicine. Yet the toughest part of the job for me is the tortoise-pace of change, even though we slowly increase the number of clients seen each year. And even though we can boast about our latest accomplishment taking Telemedicine to our Canadian Astronaut aboard the Space Shuttle, I still wanted to do more.

What excites me the most about this gift is that it empowers us to really become innovative again! To think outside the box again! To listen to great ideas, and have the resources to act. It hasn’t felt like this since the days of our Health Canada Grant in 2002-2004.

I’m grateful to the Foundation and Bell for believing in the power of Telemedicine, and to my past champion friends like Dr. Ed Lemaire, Dr. Robbie Campbell, Dr. Andre Cote, Eddie Lloyd, Martin Manseau and many others who have believed in this for as long as I have.

As per our blog policy - the opinions and comments in this article represent those of the author and should not be considered representative of the ROHCG.