Flow Based Clinical Analysis Systems: Potential Applications for Telehealth

Original Paper

Abstract

Telehealth and telemedicine are the approach to provide health care coverage to people in rural areas or patients who cannot conveniently travel to meet with doctors at a hospital. The telehealth system requires a multidisciplinary collaboration involving various sectors such as telecommunications, information technology, medical experts, hospitals, equipment suppliers and social workers. The advantages of automatic flow based systems in reducing the volume of sample, the analysis cost, the analysis time and the need of having highly trained personnel, make them suitable for use where the healthcare facility budget is inadequate. Therefore, flow based techniques have potential for applications in clinical analysis as part of the telehealth system in the developing countries.