Institute of Tropical Medicine, Nationalestraat 155, 2000 Antwerp, Belgium.
J Telemed Telecare. 2011;17(2):65-70. doi: 10.1258/jtt.2010.100308. Epub 2010 Nov 15.
In 2003, the Institute of Tropical Medicine (ITM) in Antwerp set up an Internet-based decision support service to assist health-care workers in the management of difficult HIV/AIDS cases. This service is available to physicians working in resource-limited settings. Between April 2003 and December 2009, the telemedicine service received 1058 queries, from more than 40 countries, mostly resource-constrained. In the first six years there were 952 queries, of which 459 (49%) were posted on the web-based telemedicine discussion forum and the rest sent by email. All queries were handled by a co-ordinator who forwarded them to a network of specialists, based at the ITM and at other institutions. The average time to provide a first reply was 24 hours. Almost half of the queries received in the first six years (n = 466) were related to the use of antiretroviral medications. The response rate to a user questionnaire was 19% (73 questionnaires returned out of 387 delivered): half of those (n = 37) came from active users and the remainder (n = 36) from clinicians who had never used the system. The user survey showed that telemedicine advice was valuable in the management of specific cases, and significantly influenced the way that clinicians managed other similar cases subsequently. Nonetheless, there was a declining trend in the rate of use of the service.
2003 年，安特卫普热带医学研究所（ITM）建立了一个基于互联网的决策支持服务，以协助医疗保健工作者管理困难的艾滋病毒/艾滋病病例。这项服务面向资源有限环境中的医生提供。在 2003 年 4 月至 2009 年 12 月期间，远程医疗服务收到了来自 40 多个国家的 1058 个查询，其中大多数资源有限。在前六年中，有 952 个查询，其中 459 个（49%）发布在基于网络的远程医疗讨论论坛上，其余的则通过电子邮件发送。所有查询都由一名协调员处理，他将这些查询转发给 ITM 和其他机构的专家网络。提供首次回复的平均时间为 24 小时。在前六年收到的查询中，近一半（n=466）与抗逆转录病毒药物的使用有关。用户问卷调查的回复率为 19%（387 份问卷中有 73 份返回）：其中一半（n=37）来自活跃用户，其余（n=36）来自从未使用过该系统的临床医生。用户调查显示，远程医疗咨询在特定病例的管理中具有价值，并显著影响了临床医生随后管理其他类似病例的方式。尽管如此，服务的使用率呈下降趋势。
