A new project aims to lift the “iron curtain” between Ukrainian doctors and the wider world

Children of Chornobyl Relief and Development Fund (CCRDF), founded by immigrants from Ukraine Dr. Zenon Matkivsky and his wife Nadia, has decided to help propel Ukraine’s healthcare system into the 21st century. After 22 years of work in Ukraine, the fund has established cooperation with 31 hospitals and 3 orphanages that specialize in neonatology, perinatology, pediatric oncology and pediatric surgery.

13 Ukrainian hospitals in Chernihiv, Chernivtsi, Donetsk, Lutsk, Poltava, Kyiv, Ivano-Frankivsk, Lviv, Rivne, Kherson and Volodymyrets will soon join the global network for real-time video consultations with medical specialists via the global telemedicine network. Total project cost will be more than 620,000 dollars. The program implementation includes procuring necessary equipment, its installation, launching and personnel training. The telemedicine program implementation will be the last project to be realized by the CCRDF before the organization ends its humanitarian mission in February 2012, after 22 years of work,” its founder Dr. Matkivsky said.

he CCRDF chose this program because it saw telemedicine as the best investment it could make in the future of Ukraine, as it will “fit our healthcare in the world grid.” According to the director of the Pediatric and Cardiac Surgery Clinical and Research Center Illia Yemets, Ukrainian doctors lack experience that the world’s leading countries’doctors have. This center, located in Kyiv, was the first in Ukraine to use telemedicineб and it has done so for five years already.

When Zenon asked me about my needs, I replied we were lacking experience. We have acquired it by now. With the help of these new technologies, we have saved quite a few lives of children with heart defects, as telemedicine provides us with knowledge we need even if the source of that knowledge is very far from here. For example, if a less experienced doctor has ultrasound picture of a pregnant woman and sees that some organ of her fetus is developing pathologically, he or she may submit the picture via the Internet (using the special telemedicine software and hardware) to an experienced doctor that sits in some other place anywhere in the world, and the experienced colleague would advise the less experienced one how to act so as to harm neither the woman nor her fetus. Doctors at our center have at least 18-20 consultations with foreign colleagues every week. Believe me, if one does heart surgery on a five-hour-old child, it is a critically important job. Doctors all over the world have long used such technologies, and Ukraine needs to lift the ‘iron curtain,’ too,” Yemets said.

he United States Ambassador John Tefft, speaking at the launch of the project, called it one of the best investments in development of Ukrainian medicine: “I hope it will encourage the Ukrainian side to further improve their healthcare system.”

Our objective is to get this machinery to work in Ukrainian hospitals and to provide doctors with opportunities to establish contacts with each other, within Ukrainian medical community as well as with American, European or Australian colleagues. The world has enough first-rate doctors that are ready to teach Ukrainians. Some hospitals will have their participation in the project financed by us, but there are some others that have Akhmetov and Pinchuk as their patrons.

think it is likely that they also would want to join. Another question is who and how will coordinate the telemedicine operation in Ukraine. I think that this responsibility may be accepted by

r. Yemets, as he is an experienced user of the global network. The only thing I would like to emphasize is that access to this technology should be provided only to highly professional and experienced doctors, because telemedicine in the hands of layman will run the great risk of misinterpretation of information and resulting harm to patients. No technology works unless it is used by experts,” Matkivsky concluded.

he CCRDF’s partners, donors and sponsors see the shutting down of the fund’s operations after providing 63 million dollars of assistance to Ukraine’s medicine over 22 years as not the end, but the beginning – that is, the beginning of a new work in our healthcare system, “making the Ukrainian medical future through modern technologies.”