How NASA's telemedicine doctors keep International Space Station astronauts healthy

Healthcare IT News: There’s no doctor onboard the International Space Station. Because of the costs associated with shipping anything up to space, there’s a carefully chosen selection of medical supplies and devices. For everything else, the six international astronauts that live and work on the station rely on NASA’s own brand of telemedicine.

“Telemedicine really is our only resource,” Dr. Shannan Moynihan, deputy chief of space and occupational medicine at the NASA Johnson Space Center, said in a presentation at HIMSS18. “Unfortunately we don’t get to make house calls. I’ve tried that, it didn’t fly.”

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