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Local GPs are increasingly using hi-tech devices and online tools to speed up diagnosis and keep people out of hospital throughout rural Rodney and Northland.
Leading the charge is Wellsford-based Coast to Coast Healthcare, which has seven clinics, including a new urgent care clinic at Morrison Drive in Warkworth.
Directors and GPs Tim Malloy and Neil Anderson have been quick to embrace anything that can prevent their thousands of patients taking a long trek to a city hospital. One of the most recent acquisitions is the Butterfly hand-held ultrasound machine, a tiny portable scanning device that costs a tenth of a traditional ultrasound system and can pick up a range of abnormalities from gallstones to internal bleeding. Dr Anderson says that while it will never pick up the degree of detail that a full-size specialised machine will, it can answer a range of medical questions and quicken diagnosis.
“I probably use it most days. I can check things like a potential aneurysm, or a gall bladder infection,” he says. “I had it with me at a head-on crash on State Highway 1 a couple of weeks ago and could just take it out to quickly see if there was any bleeding or fluid build-up.”
The single ultrasound head is controlled from a menu of pre-set functions and frequencies accessed via iPad or phone.
Another hand-held device that uses smartphone technology is the Dermascope, which combines a microscope and light to look just under the skin surface to check moles and lesions for skin cancer. Dr Anderson can save an image, attach the scope to his phone and transfer the picture straight into a patient’s medical records.
Coast to Coast has also pioneered rural point-of-care testing locally, where a range of blood tests can be run in-house to assess potentially serious issues, such as the risk of deep vein thrombosis or whether a patient with chest pain may have had a small heart attack. After seeing Coast to Coast’s results from a number of years, the District Health Board has since rolled out the testing regime to rural GP surgeries throughout the region.
“We call these things our toys, but they are all devices that enable us to complete the clinical jigsaw.
The more pieces you have before you’ve completed it, the more you can see the whole picture,” Dr Malloy says.
“When you get a little bit of information from one of these things, you can know what you’re dealing with before you get into a hospital setting. We don’t have the luxury of a hospital around here, so the more we can do things by other means, the better.”
Dr Anderson agrees: “We can keep patients in the community and answer question if we have access to information. Hospital admissions cost a huge amount of money per day and patients don’t want to go to the city and spend hours waiting. So, we’re investing more in primary care to reduce the need for hospital treatment and admissions.”
Technology is also being used to give patients instant access to their personal records, results and other information, with an online registration system called Manage My Health.
“This is a health intranet-based access portal that’s safe and where information is secure,” Dr Malloy says. “We will be doing more and more through this pathway and I think it’s going to be the main mechanism by which people communicate with us in the future.”
