Teleophthalmology for Diabetic Patients: Saving Vision through IT

摘要

We analyze how telemedicine can be employed in preventive care of diabetic patients. From different perspectives, we discuss conditions under which telemedicine based diabetic retinopathy detection can be cost effective when compared to referring patients to an eye doctor for a standard dilated eye examination. We analyze how success of this program can depend on the prevalence and incidence of retinopathy and eye care use for the given population. We also present numerical results based on our model by focusing on a specific case for a clinic, federally funded to care for migrant farm workers. While telemedicine can be proved to be cost-effective from the societal perspective, as it avoids blindness and helps in preventive care, the benefit to the clinics may not be on the economics side but more to do with meeting the objective on screening patients. We conclude by discussing the incentive programs that can be used to influence the clinics in adopting telemedicine and suggest how images taken of the eye can help educate patients about diabetes to help promote better self-care and health outcomes.