Article Text

Download PDFPDF
CASE REPORT
Use of home telemedicine for critical illness rehabilitation: an Indian success story
  1. Dileep Unnikrishnan1,
  2. Dileep Raman2,
  3. Dhruv Joshi2 and
  4. B S Ajaikumar3
  1. 1 Internal Medicine, Monmouth Medical Center, Long Branch, New Jersey, USA
  2. 2 Department of Critical Care Medicine, Cloudphysician Healthcare, Bengaluru, Karnataka, India
  3. 3 Department of Oncology, HealthCare Global Enterprises Ltd, Bangalore, Karnataka, India
  1. Correspondence to Dr Dileep Unnikrishnan, drdileepunni{at}gmail.com

Abstract

One-fifth of healthcare beneficiaries in developed nations get discharged from hospitals to physician supervised skilled nursing care facilities. In low-income and middle-income countries like India, postdischarge skilled nursing facilities are at a very nascent stage and largely underequipped in terms of infrastructure, skilled nursing and physician staff to manage complicated patients. Hence the responsibility of management of such patients lies largely with their families. We present a case where a 26-year-old man with Duchenne Muscular Dystrophy who became ventilator dependent following major surgeries was weaned off his ventilator and rehabilitated back to his prehospital state. This was done at his home with visiting nurses and rehabilitation services under telemedicine supervision by a critical care specialist. Use of telemedicine services could be a viable and cost-effective option to ensure adherence to evidence-based medicine and standardisation of care in resource limited countries such as India.

  • rehabilitation medicine
  • intensive care
  • chronic disease / disability nursing
  • public health

Statistics from Altmetric.com

Request Permissions

If you wish to reuse any or all of this article please use the link below which will take you to the Copyright Clearance Center’s RightsLink service. You will be able to get a quick price and instant permission to reuse the content in many different ways.

Footnotes

  • Contributors DU, DR, DJ and BSA have directly contributed to the manuscript preparation of the case report or care of the patient.

  • Funding The authors have not declared a specific grant for this research from any funding agency in the public, commercial or not-for-profit sectors.

  • Competing interests None declared.

  • Provenance and peer review Not commissioned; externally peer reviewed.

  • Patient consent for publication Obtained.