Healthy Opportunity In Telemedicine?

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The medical industry is showing a lot of interest in telemedicine, but there is a lot of action needed to be taken before that enthusiasm becomes a reality.

That was the word from Jonathan Edwards, research vice president at Gartner, who discussed the new technology at a presentation at the Healthcare IT Summit, held in early November in La Quinta, Calif. The conference was hosted by Everything Channel, the parent company of CRN.

Edwards defined telemedicine as the delivery of health-care services when the clinician and the patient are at different locations.

However, Edwards said, telemedicine is not the same thing as telecare, which is more involved with technologies and services in the home for which customers pay, including fall detectors, bed monitors and panic alarms.

Edwards said that the time to stop talking about telemedicine has arrived, because people have been talking about it way too long.

He said there also have been too many pilot programs done for the wrong reasons. For instance, vendors may throw money at something that looks cool, then write a press release and walk away. Or a university may set up a controlled pilot program in an artificial environment, say it looks cool, and then walk away.

"I'm not saying, don't do a pilot," he said. "I'm saying, do a pilot that you don't walk away from."

Telemedicine is a technology that offers many benefits, Edwards said. Patients, for instance, get easier access to care rather than having to drive long distances, and many patients who otherwise might have to stay in a nursing home may be able to live at home instead.

For medical staff, telemedicine means less travel time and more ability to monitor patients from remote locations. Telemedicine also facilitates the transfer of skills from specialists to primary care physicians, Edwards said.

Medical organizations also benefit from reduced travel costs, better care and monitoring in rural areas, the ability to provide equal access to care, and the ability to offer new services and reach new patients, he said.

However, there is still a lot of work to be done before telemedicine becomes a reality, Edwards said.

The financial issues involving reimbursement of funds, how to pay physicians for longer-term care, and the justification of telemedicine for a hospital when the end result will be a cut in hospital stays all have yet to be resolved.

Meanwhile, medical staff will require new training in order to coordinate remote care, and will face new licensing, legal liability, accreditation and regulatory hurdles.

And, on the technology side, there is a lot of work to be done to integrate telemedicine with electronic medical records and deploy the needed accessibility and bandwidth infrastructure, he said.

There are already some successful examples of telemedicine implementations, Edwards said.

For instance, two private companies, TCCN and KYSOS, were set up in the Netherlands with the help of insurance companies to provide teledermatology for the remote treatment of skin problems.

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