Some telemedicine basics for the Guerrilla clinic practitioner

Telemedicine is a word that is not new to most medical practitioners. It is something most medical professionals do at least once a week if not once a day. It has become a buzz word however due to the coof.

Zoom and other A/V applications have spoiled us in our perspective of what telemedicine should look like. Especially for the guerrilla. We most likely will be practicing telemedicine through a text-based digital radio solution. There are several out there, with each having its own strengths and weaknesses. You must figure out what will work in your situation, no one else can answer this.

The first should be for shorter-distance telemedicine needs. And that is either a baofeng or other UHF/VHF radio using a tablet and AndFlmsg. You can either just send things in text or send pictures of documents. Or a combination of the two. This allows teams not too far out from their TOC element to send up updates. This could be especially helpful if doing community wellness patrols.

The other more likely scenario is being outside the range of UHF/VHF radios and having to use HF. Most likely this will be used with NVIS but that is not my avenue (if only we had a guy who specialized in that…). This is where the multitude of hf digital modes can really come into play. JS8Call really shows some promise. I had the opportunity to see what you can do with js8call when I was in Wyoming. It is truly quite impressive. But hf allows you to even interface with providers of different specialties (assuming you’ve set that up) if you need a consult of that kind.

Radios allow you to do some pretty cool stuff and allow the guerrilla to talk to people outside of his immediate AO if he has the need to. Telemedicine is going to offer the guerrila a big boost in his treatment ability. It’s something you should defintely be practicing. Because as with any skill, you shouldn’t be trying to learn how to do it, when it matters most.

If you want to learn more, head over to the patreon or sign up for a class in person.