Jazmine Mackay-Feeney, Nathan Ingerson, Nikolas Suominen and Dr Darren O’Brien from the RBWH Thoracic Medicine team

RBWH Respiratory Services have been providing telehealth services to their patients for many years. In the 2020/21 financial year, the team were the best performing telehealth service in Metro North Health, providing a huge 3,502 telehealth non-admitted service events to their patients over the 12-month period.

RBWH Respiratory will soon begin their telesleep program offering a virtual sleep study service to eligible Central Queensland patients.

Director Thoracic and Sleep Sciences Dr Darren O’Brien said telehealth reduces the inconvenience of travel, time away from work and costs for patients in accessing tertiary care, as well as reducing healthcare costs and our carbon footprint.

“The challenges are to find the right technology to assist with the telehealth clinical assessment of the patient,” he said.

“As part of our new Telesleep program, we are combining traditional telehealth technology with the use of new camera “glasses” to undertake sleep study setups, and cloud-based software we can use to remote download CPAP machine data to provide assisted CPAP therapy and troubleshooting care for our patients.

“We can provide this service in partnership with CQHHS and the patient can remain in their home-town throughout the testing and treatment process rather than travel to Brisbane or another QH “bricks and mortar” sleep service.”

Patient feedback on the thoracic telehealth program has been overwhelmingly positive, with one patient saying, “it made it a lot easier to have the appointment virtually, with no parking issues, no travel time and no waiting”. Another said, “Keep up the good service, I’m very grateful for it. I’m pleased with how the doctors from different specialisations communicated with each other to provide my treatment. I give a gold star to the service.”