Everest team tests extremes and limits of telemedicine
By DON LONG
Healthcare InfoTech Managing Editor
An unusual mix of explorers and medical personnel set off this past week on a six-week expedition to take telemedicine to the rooftop of the world. And what this team discover about the combination of medical communications with the most extreme conditions on the globe may ultimately take telemedicine into the Star Trek era.
The effort is being undertaken by a 15-member health-science group which will attempt to climb Mount Everest with the assistance of sophisticated medical devices and the support of various medical experts via telemedical contact.
The mission: to study how the body responds to the most extreme environments. The group’s larger goal: to see how their medical equipment might respond in the extreme conditions of outer space, since this is the type of equipment that astronauts will take to the International Space Station.
Conversely, what is applicable to the extremes of the world’s tallest mountain and the most advanced mission in space will hopefully be brought back to earth to enhance, again by means of advanced communication systems, the quality of medical care anyplace on the planet.
The Everest Extreme Expedition (known as E3) scheduled to begin the actual climb early next week was organized by the Yale /NASA Commercial Space Center for Medical Informatics and Technology Applications (CSC/ MITA), Millennium Healthcare Solutions and The Explorers Club, with support from the National Institutes of Health. This year’s expedition builds upon the experience of the Everest Extreme Expedition ’98, which provided the first-ever telemedicine link between Everest and the U.S.
Mount Everest offers a unique opportunity to evaluate and explore the challenges of humans in extreme and remote environments, according to the expedition organizers. The E3 99 team will operate at altitudes of 17,500 feet and higher for more than five weeks. As they climb, support facilities at Yale University will provide to the Everest site full communications, management and real-time analysis.
As they climb vital signs monitors worn by team members and climbers will transmit scientific data on their performance, endurance, physiologic status, and location to colleagues in the telemedicine field lab at Everest Base Camp and on to Yale University. And data such as ultrasound images will be transmitted to Yale University and to Walter Reed Army Medical Center during daily rounds conducted by physicians at Base Camp.
Much of this data will also be made available to the general public since after since it will be processed for posting on the expedition web site, www.everestextreme99.org.
Providing oversight to this program is Ronald Merrell, MD, FACS, a professor of surgery and department chair at the Yale School of Medicine. Merrell says that most of the instruments being tested on the expedition "were not available until recently. However, the coming decade will see adaptations of similar devices in rural areas and home care delivered through hospitals and EMT (emergency medical technician) teams."
Merrell added that "the procedures and technologies tested on this expedition have enormous potential for delivering high-quality healthcare to patients residing in remote locations and even to the homes of patients suffering from chronic conditions such as diabetes, heart disease and emphysema, among others."
Among the instruments to be evaluated will be the Esoate color-flow Doppler ultrasound system from Biosound, the 3-D sonography system made by Echotech, and a trans-mucosal microscope from Cytometrix. These will document circulatory responses and adaptations to long-term extreme conditions, both macroscopically and microscopically.
Besides simply making the collected data available to scientists and researchers, the team members will be involved in live interactive video and Internet conferences broadcast from Mount Everest to science teachers and schoolchildren, as well as to the children’s parents throughout the U.S. and Canada.
Financial and in-kind support for the E3 expedition and its educational outreach comes from a wide range medical device, healthcare and health science groups, such as Olympus America, Nestle Clinical Nutrition, Cisco Systems, Saint Charles Hospital, Becton Dickinson, DHS Systems LLC, Kifaru International, and PowerBar.
"Why is this expedition of value? This combination of exploration and field science to measure real-time physiological effects en-route the summit of Mount Everest epitomizes what should be considered true exploration in the years to come," said Dr. Alfred S. McLaren, president of The Explorers Club.
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