Virtual Consulting Room successfully piloted

A Virtual Consulting Room offering healthcare professionals the facility to compare notes for medical consultations has been developed by staff and students at the Royal Free Hampstead NHS Trust and the Royal Free and University College Medical School in London.

The Virtual Consulting Room (VcR) is an internet-based medical consultation application, which streamlines patient care by facilitating communication between healthcare professionals.

It hosts four modules which together ‘provide a platform for incremental consultation and seamless access to local specialist knowledge’, according to Dr Pasquale Berlingieri, clinical research fellow at University College London.

“The VcR has been developed to enable communication in a manner which could help [to alleviate] the disparity between demand and supply in the NHS. In order to engage even the most reluctant doctor, the user interface is visually attractive and intuitive to the point where almost all NHS healthcare professionals could enter and use the VcR without the need for training,” Dr Berlingieri added.

Thirteen general practices took part in an eight week pilot study where 58 GPs were offered access to the VcR by adding an icon to their desktop computers. At the end of the study questionnaires were completed, which demonstrated that almost 60 per cent of the GPs used the service to help them to diagnose patients.

“In eight weeks, we had a total of 177 visits and 35,244 ‘hits’ on our system. GPs found that it was a useful learning tool and were able to use the system to relate patient symptoms to those described by clinicians on the system, helping them decide whether or not an outpatient appointment was needed,” said Dr Berlingieri.

As well as the 58 GPs, junior doctors at the Royal Free hospital were also involved in a pilot study in 2004.

Dr Eleanor Wood, one of the junior doctors involved in the pilot, now a consultant gastroenterologist at Homerton Hospital, London, said: “With emergency departments getting more and more busy, it could be up to nine hours before a patient eventually receives a firm diagnosis and preventative action can be taken to resolve the problem. The VcR gives junior doctors quick access to recognised medical opinions which can help to speed up patient diagnoses and patient treatment times.”

The pilot study amongst junior doctors demonstrated that in almost 95 per cent of cases the VcR was able to help them reach a diagnosis and improved their knowledge of the situation they face.

Dr Wood added: “This preliminary study shows that the VcR is a tremendous educational resource, with its use resulting in improved knowledge and supporting clinical decision-making. It is interesting to note that VcR truly influenced patient’s care by altering the management plan in over a third of cases.”

Dr Berlingieri added: “This study indicates that a locally developed, internet-based application can be easily deployed, interests GPs, is educational and offers the potential to influence patient care.”

A sampler version of the VcR is available on the medical school site and the full version is available to staff at the Royal Free and students at the Royal Free-UCL Medical School.

Dr Berlingieri and Dr Wood were speaking at the Royal Society of Medicine’s TeleMed and eHealth ‘06 conference.