Anthony Smith

Telehealth services for Indigenous Communities: For nearly two decades, Professor Anthony Smith has been working in partnership with the Cherbourg community, to establish a telemedicine service for the routine screening of Indigenous children at high risk of chronic health conditions. With a high prevalence of ear disease and inconsistent screening procedures, his idea was to convert a vehicle into a mobile health clinic with all the necessary equipment on board for collecting and transmitting clinical assessments. Clinical information is collected by Aboriginal health workers, then uploaded to an online database, which is accessible to the specialists in Brisbane who routinely review cases and provide advice regarding clinical management. His program has resulted in a routine screening program - a tangible community benefit—which now serves thousands of children within schools in the South Burnett region of Queensland. Since the commencement of the health screening telemedicine program in 2009, routine assessments of approx. 1250 children have been carried out in 35 schools annually. The proportion of children being screened for chronic ear conditions has increased from around 38% to over 85% of all eligible cases in the community; while the mean waiting time from referral to actual specialist appointment has been reduced from 73 days in 2009 to 29 days in 2011. The mobile telemedicine ear-screening service delivers an appropriate model of care that reinforces the partnership between Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander community health services and specialist health services in a tertiary facility and demonstrates a range of benefits associated with the generation of a strong community led health-screening program, supported by specialists at a distance.

Post-acute burns care and telemedicine: Professor Anthony Smith had a key role in creating the telepaediatric service at the Royal Children’s Hospital has resulted in significant changes in the way outpatient services are delivered for certain groups of patients. Having had a clinical role in the paediatric burns unit in Brisbane, he was very familiar with patients and families who returned to the department on a regular basis for outpatient care. The time, cost and inconvenience of time away from home was something he was extremely conscious of. After extensive engagement with the multi-disciplinary burns team, Dr Smith introduced telehealth consultations for the post-acute care of children with burn injuries. This required a new model of care, where regional occupational therapists and nurses were trained to deliver outpatient care, with the support of specialists (by videoconference). Instead of traveling back to Brisbane, families were able to attend an outpatient appointment at their nearest hospital, by videoconference. His work resulted in more than 3500 telehealth burns consultations in the first ten years; overall, telehealth appointments accounted for around 14% of all outpatient appointments in the burns unit. This represented a completely new direction in the way outpatient services are delivered in Queensland. Since those early days, this model has continued to be used, and has now been reproduced in other states including NSW, Western Australia and Victoria.

Medicare funding for specialist video-consultations: In 2010, Professor Anthony Smith was the lead investigator (CIA) of a tender to deliver a national report on telehealth implementation and technical requirements. This report guided the strategic decisions related to funding videoconferencing consultations through the Medical Benefits Schedule and informed the resultant legislation that was implemented by the Federal Government on 1 July, 2011. This work has been cited by cited by leading agencies including the: RACP, RACGP, ACRRM, RCNA and NEHTA.