UTILIZATION OF TELEMEDICINE IN PRIMARY HEALTH CARE SER-VICES OF HUNGARY – A SETTLEMENT GEOGRAPHICAL ASPECT

Abstract

Telemedicine or commonly called „eHealth” or „telehealth” is a distant health care service which became the spot of increasing interest in the last few years. The financial crisis and newly evolved paradigm of more efficient usage of resources with distance and time shrinking ICT brought changes in health policy and health care system. The information revolution resulted easy access and permanent cheapen in information technologies, such as internet which eventuated decreasing geographical distances influencing health care as well. Despite in Hungary these widely known and used techniques are rarely applied.

In this research the possible definitions for telemedicine are investigated, and also the method how it can be shifted within different levels of health care system. There is also an aim to research that on which level of the settlement network and how effectively can telemedicine be implemented and improve primary health care services.

In the first part of the paper a brief theoretical approach was made describing the main features, types, merits and demerits of eHealth systems. In the second part statistical analysis was made on the result of Census 2011 and 2001 in connection with the primary health care processes, characteristics and demography. The paper attempts to impound the settlements which can be positively affected by implementing telemedicine.  For the analysis five basic items were monitored, the existence of primary health care system, the number of general practices, the number of clients at general practices, the population share of age over 60 years and the population of periphery.

The probably mostly affected settlements are featured with low quality or absence of primary health care service (shortage in doctors comparing to national average) and higher proportion of elders in population which likely results higher prevalence in high blood pressure or diabetes. Considering these factors the most affected settlements are small villages. In these areas the introduction of the telemedicine system would be favorable to improve health status of residents.