Community Health Kiosk
The simple solution to provide health services in community settings
Rural Health Care
Rural healthcare brings many challenges; areas are diverse with populations often scattered over a large area – this means that GP practices have to spend more time travelling to see patients and likewise, patients have difficulty accessing health services due to transport issues. This causes ‘distance decay’, where service use can decrease with increasing distance. Rural populations are also increasingly older, and therefore in greater need of health and care services.
How can EK Interactive Innovations help?
Here, at EK, we have worked hard on identifying how our self-health kiosk could play a role in providing alternative health services and information in a rural community setting. Using our self-screening kiosks, patients can monitor their own condition using the peripherals linked to the kiosk. These include blood pressure measurement, height, weight, blood oxygen, heart rate and rhythm, and peak flow rates. These results can either be linked to the patient record for access by their GP, or can be linked to a user account for self-monitoring. The kiosks can serve as an information hub, providing a directory of health services, advice, or information on specific health campaigns, such as healthy eating. Our kiosk hardware is also ideal for use with other products, such as virtual consultation software.
Rural Research
In a research project which reimagined community healthcare services, The Kings Fund (January 2018), suggested that there needs to be a shift in focus across the whole health and care system from hospitals to a model focused around communities and community services. Future models of community-based care should empower people to take control of their own health and care.
This new model could potentially be more inclusive for those in rural areas. Rural social centres with established volunteer networks, such as Community Centres, the humble village hall (or even the Post Office or local pub!) could provide an ideal focus for new innovative solutions to rural isolation. These may include virtual clinics and video consultations to meet the needs of those that have difficulty in accessing healthcare services.