Public health in hospitals – can informatics bridge the gap?

220 © Royal College of Physicians 2017. All rights reserved. The tele-empathy opportunities in medicine are far-reaching. Tele-empathy can be valuable for clinical manifestations that can be seen and interpreted through the lens of data science, which includes many of our senses (Table 1 ). However, teleempathy is more than just symptom simulation. It has the potential to improve our ability to control patient symptoms by allowing us to fine-tune and titrate treatments. We could, additionally, record data from patients on a specific treatment, and use machine learning to digitise the treatment through mathematical modelling. This could enable us to not only sense what the patient is experiencing, but to also predict what effect specific treatment may have on a patient via the digitised treatment. This has tremendous implications for future research and clinical trials. Our research group recently initiated a study that aims to quantify the level of empathy experienced by neurologists both before and after use of the PD tele-empathy device. Future studies will measure the longitudinal retention of empathy. In addition, new tele-empathy devices for diseases where the need for empathy is great are currently in development, including diabetes (peripheral neuropathy), chronic obstructive pulmonary disease (shortness of breath) and pruritus (dermatologic and systemic diseases). Tele-empathy can harness the power of technology to cater to specific needs within a wide range of clinical areas, stimulating new knowledge and insights in the process. This fosters invaluable opportunities such as the cultivation of empathy, more precise treatment titration, and more accurate treatment result predictions, benefitting physicians, caregivers and, more importantly, patients themselves. ■