A SYSTEM is being developed in Jamaica that will enable ill visitors to access medical care from their hotel rooms using the telephone and a specially-issued calling card known as ‘Dr on Call’.

“Each hotel can have these calling cards in every room, which means that when tourists are in their rooms and sick, they can use the cards to get a doctor immediately,” explained Dr Winston Davidson, the Chief Executive Officer at Health Care for All Jamaica Limited, the company responsible for researching and developing the system.

Davidson was making a presentation Monday on the Caribbean model of the Information Technology (IT) driven system known as telemedicine, at a Regional Consultation and Workshop on Sustainable Trade and Innovation.

Telemedicine, Davidson told the gathering, involves a network of medical expertise linked together to deliver medical services at a distance.

He did not go into detail about how the system, which is still being developed, will work. However, he said the first group of doctors, known as Medical Emergency Telephony Service Providers, had been trained to “manage sick tourists”.

Under the training programme, conducted at the University of the West Indies, the doctors were taught how to respond to emergencies in a quick and efficient way, Davidson emphasised.

The system, Davidson added, has the potential to make local health care more affordable and to give Jamaica and the Caribbean a significant share of the health tourism market in the United States and Europe.

He told the gathering that plans are in place to set up “pilots in an number of hotels”, but he did not provide a start-up date.

According to Davidson, 70 per cent of the funding had fully implemented the first phase of the project and the second phase would involve the full implementation of the national telemedicine network, with the participation of the public.

A Telemedicine research unit is also being set up in the UWI School of Graduate Studies as part of phase two and will see graduates doing ongoing research to drive “the evidence based system of telemedicine, he told the Observer.

“The project provides an infrastructure for the export of health services in the global domain and the development of a health tourism industry,” he noted.

Also to be explored, Davidson said, was the possibility of partnerships being established with health care insurance companies locally and abroad in order to make the Caribbean the primary region for recreation, health wellness, recuperation and good living.

He argued that Jamaica and the Caribbean could tap into a market that was “overpriced” and where “we have an overwhelming competitive advantage”.

The country, he added, was in a position to compete with health care in developed countries, such as the US and Europe because annual health care per capita cost 20 to 40 times more than in Jamaica.

“In Jamaica, health cost per capita is US$149 per year while in the US it is US$4,100 and in Europe US$2,500 per year. Our life expectancy compares very favourably with the US and Europe,” he said.

Davidson also explained that another aspect of the Caribbean model of telemedicine would use multimedia and video systems to equip and train health personnel functioning from any location.

“We also have multimedia and video systems where we can equip and train the same nurse at the hotel to link with designated centres of excellence in Jamaica and the Caribbean,” the Health Care for All Jamaica CEO said.

He went on to suggest that there could also be hotels specialising in the area of wellness and co branding indigenous therapies and herbs and spices in their treatment.

Meanwhile, Raymond Van Ermen, of European Partners for the Environment and a member of STIC, informed the gathering that the organisation was an alliance between governments, business and civil society, desirous of accelerating the transition towards sustainable development.

STIC, he said, was trying to organise regional groups worldwide, but it was up to Jamaica and the Caribbean to decide if they wanted to set up a branch.

Producers of developing countries had little say in the way developed countries and multinationals designed their purchasing policies towards sustainable development but STIC wanted to change this and to build trust, he said.

The function was hosted by the National Commission on Science and Technology (NCST) in association with the UK-based Sustainable Trade and Innovation Centre (STIC) at the Knutsford Court Hotel in Kingston.