Beyond Technology.

Telemedicine: Making Palliative Care Better

What if technology could help people receive care where they actually wanted to be?

Palliative care made me think differently about what a healthcare system is designed to do.

We know that many people die in hospital, even when being at home or closer to the people and places that matter to them may be preferable.

For someone living in a large, geographically dispersed region, access to specialized palliative care can create another barrier. A patient may be too sick to travel easily. Families may be far away. Specialists may be located hundreds of kilometres from the community where care is needed.

I began to ask a different question:

What if the patient didn't have to travel for the expertise?

Telemedicine offered a way to bring specialized knowledge to the patient rather than automatically moving the patient to the specialist.

But the technology was never the interesting part to me.

The interesting part was what it could make possible.

Could a specialist participate in a consultation without a patient leaving their community?

Could technology reduce the physical and emotional burden of travel?

Could families remain more connected?

Could we support local care while still providing access to specialized expertise?

And ultimately:

Could we use technology to help people receive better care in a place that mattered to them?

This was the subject of my TEDxThunderBay talk, Telemedicine: Making Palliative Care Better.

It reflects an approach that has stayed with me throughout my career: start with the human problem, understand the barriers created by the system, and then ask whether technology can meaningfully change the experience.

Sometimes innovation isn't about creating something entirely new.

Sometimes it is about looking at an existing capability and asking:

What if we used it differently?

Watch the TEDx Talk

Telemedicine – Making Palliative Care Better
TEDxThunderBay