Opinion: A digital health service just makes sense

New Zealand's biggest private childcare chain BestStart Educare has signed up to Dr Lance O'Sullivan's digital health service health-by-email service. Photo / File

We live in a digital world where people are time poor, so a digital health service makes sense.

If you can receive health advice easier and faster than usual, why wouldn't you use it?

New Zealand's biggest private childcare chain BestStart Educare, which runs 280 centres from Kaitaia to Invercargill, has signed up to Dr Lance O'Sullivan's digital health service iMOKO.

Through technology iMOKO delivers high-quality basic health services, helps to make a prompt diagnosis and offers treatment options and once approved by a telehealth clinician, prescriptions are sent off to the appropriate avenue.

Dr O'Sullivan - a former Rotorua GP and Kiwibank's New Zealander of the Year in 2014 - started offering medical diagnoses and prescriptions to children at remote Northland schools by video link and email from his Kaitaia general practice in 2012.

Better access to healthcare can only be a positive.

As a working mum, there have been many instances when I have taken my children to an after-hours GP because that's the only free time I have to take them to see a doctor.

While living in Australia if my children were ever sick and needed to be collected from school, other family members would pick them up and care for them until I had finished work. This often meant getting home about 10pm - after we had seen a doctor and made a trip to the after-hours pharmacy.

Back home in New Zealand, I don't have the same family support, so I have chosen to get the flu vaccine for myself and my children - and so far I haven't yet needed to pick up any sick kids from school.

But, if a digital health service was available, you can guarantee I would use it - it would make treatment more readily available and make healthcare more accessible overall. It makes sense that schools take advantage of the service on offer to them.