ACCURACY OF DIAGNOSIS AND TREATMENT PLANS IN TELEDERMATOLOGY: A PILOT STUDY

4^th International Conference on Medical Informatics & Telehealth

October 6-7, 2016 | London, UK

Hamed Mehdizadeh

Shahid Beheshti University of Medical Science, Iran

Posters & Accepted Abstracts: J Health Med Informat

Abstract :

Limited mobility, high costs of transportation and specialized care, make it very difficult to get specialized care services for the elderly, especially those living in nursing homes, particularly in the field of skin diseases. In this study, we evaluate the accuracy of diagnostic and treatment plan in teledermatology compared to in-person examination. The population of this quasi-experimental study,consisted of 280 elderly people living in Kahrizak Charity Foundation in Tehran. The exclusion criteria included: emergency skin conditions and genital skin lesions. All participants should have signed a consent form. No sampling was done since there were few qualified individuals (n = 46) finally, 37 patients participated in the study. In order to calculate the accuracy of diagnosis and treatment planning, simple statistical methods were used.The participants with skin diseases, consisted of 37 elderly patients (aged 62 to 89), 22 of whom were men. The accuracy of diagnosis and treatment planning for patients provided by teledermatology compared to those of in-person examination were, 86% and 84%, respectively. The result shows that teledermatology can be considered as a solution to overcome these barriers and improve access to specialized skin care services and the elderly can benefit from teledermatology in nursing homes and have better access to specialized services and avoid unnecessary trips to dermatology clinics.

Biography :

Email: hamed13sep@gmail.com