Starting at 2 p.m. this Saturday, children in the pediatric center of Covenant Healthcare in Saginaw, MI, which is a customer using HitCast, an earlier release of what has become our swyMed solution, will be receiving between 200 and 400 teddy bears courtesy of the Great Lakes Harley Davidson and Tri-County Michigan Hogs. This is a […]
As with last month, this is largely geared to updates about legislation along with reminders about the upcoming Fall Forum conference in Palm Springs, CA, which I’ll have to consider as I live out Orange County. This month’s takeaways are a little more subdued than last month which had some pretty big news (see here). […]
Our industry has focused too much on cost benefits and administrative/IT buy-in, and not enough on educating, advocating for, and, well, marketing to the doctors, nurses, clinicians, technicians, assistants, and patients. They are the drivers of this change as the end users. The easier we make life for the doctors, they will push decision makers to implement this tech that is making things better for them.
Telemedicine, by enabling self-care, diagnostics that can be done at home but read at the hospital, and even in-person (via video) consultations with patients, the costs of patient follow-ups goes down as does the number of readmissions. This holds up in study after study: For instance, in one study, chronic heart failure patients using “home-based telemanagement” had 36% fewer readmissions over the course of a year than those without. The mean cost of the readmissions for those using telehealth was also about 35% less. In another, the US Department of Veteran’s Affairs, which has been a leader in telemedicine due largely to how many veterans live in rural and inaccessible areas, reports admissions reductions of 35%–an almost identical result. As more data comes in, 35-36% may become a benchmark number by which to test program effectiveness.
I wonder if this might become a monthly feature? After all, the ATA webinar I’m talking about was titled: This Month in Telemedicine. I won’t go into great detail about legislation and such. For that, I highly recommend the replay which can be found here. The three items I’d like to look at are: 1. […]
According to a study by IHS Technology and published in January, the almost 350,000 telehealth patients in 2013 will swell to7,000,000 by 2018. There is no escaping the many factors that influence the current numbers and their future trends: Rising health costs, an aging population, a shortage of qualified medical personnel including physicians of all stripes, a push from organizations from the VA to serve all its members, and the push from implementing the Affordable Care Act (Obamacare) to cover and treat more patients at lower cost. Lastly, within the last decade, technology finally caught up to the requirements, and within the last several years, due to the deep societal penetration of the smartphone and the tablet, resistance to trying these technologies has reduced.
Yes, we’re perhaps a little late with this posting. However, we think the key takeaways (for us) from this year’s ATA (American Telemedicine Association) conference are important enough to immortalize anyway. #1 We’re past the tipping point. This was such a key point that the ATA itself made sure to quote a speaker mentioning it […]
An oddly under-scrutinized aspect of telehealth, telemedicine, and mHealth, is summed up by the last of those three terms: mHealth. The “m” stands for “mobile,” and mobility requires telehealth services to be rendered over the most broadly available data networks, which usually are not the fastest. Although this is usually taken for granted with rural […]
I TOLD YOU SO! Almost 4 months ago, I wrote that TelePsychiatry is the Killer App for Video Conferencing. It may put a kink in Lucy’s walk-in practice, but the benefits to the rest of society are clear. (And if Lucy would like to Expand Her Presence, there is a place she can go) Who should come […]
VeaMea (now swy|me) visited the American Telemedicine Association Annual Conference in Tampa this past week. It was an interesting conference with thousands of participants, and hundreds of vendors. We had some interesting conversations with people who are, or are going to be, practicing Telemedicine as well as a variety of support organizations. Here are a few highlights: Rural […]
