There was a nice little write-up by John Lynn at the EMR & HIPAA site about Revolve Robotics‘ Kubi robot. Although we weren’t the focus of the article, there was a nice paragraph about needing swyMed for Kubi’s healthcare applications due to being HIPAA compliant while still having Kubi controls baked in.
Please click here to read the entire article.
Making a momentous step forward, last week New York Governor Andrew Cuomo signed into law a bill requiring private insurers to cover telehealth and telemedicine coverage, retroactive to January 1st, 2015 (Happy New Year!).
That was not a redundant sentence: New York has differentiated between telehealth and telemedicine in the bill, with the primary difference being that telemedicine must include Read more
Recently, CMS (the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services) released a proposal of new rulemaking asking for comments on easing “telehealth” requirements for ACOs (Accountable Care Organizations). You can find a wonderful press release here from the ATA (American Telemedicine Association), who was instrumental in getting CMS to reconsider their earlier rules.
Having reviewed the proposal, I had to remind myself that CMS (and, ultimately, the Department of Health and Human Services) is to actually very committed to enabling greater adoption of telehealth, and that their final rules have historically been heavily modified from their proposals. Having said that–and I’m no doctor or lawyer–but I felt this proposal to use waivers rather than simply waiving antiquated requirements just adds red tape where there shouldn’t be any. Does anyone else get that sense?
First, a quick statement of why s Read more
swyMe/swyMed is at ACEP14 (or, as they are also calling it, the Scientific Assembly) right now in Chicago. ACEP stands for the American College of Emergency Physicians, and is THE place to immerse yourself in emergency medicine. We’re showcasing our use in ambulances and emergency admissions reduction by bringing the emergency physician’s presence to the home, even in difficult rural areas.
If you’re in Chicago, come by. It’s at McCormick Place, 2201 Fort Dearborn Drive, from Oct. 27 through 30. We’re booth #1936.
If you come by, make sure to ask about the ambulance challenge!
“Is your cucumber bitter? Throw it away. Are there briars in your path? Turn aside. That is enough.”
Marcus Aurelius, Meditations.
For an industry full of innovators, there’s a distinct lack of innovation in overcoming the reimbursement issue. I believe this is largely because we’ve trained ourselves to continue focusing on reimbursement, rather than discovering how to make the lack of reimbursement work for us or on creating a new model of telemedicine that makes reimbursement an afterthought.
If you believe telemedicine won’t expand until reimbursement is solved, why are any of us involved in Telemedicine? (I assume it’s to improve healthcare, which means we shouldn’t let reimbursement stop us.)
This is not to say that reimbursement is not impo Read more
I attended a webinar last week where the speaker, Jeff Robbins, Director of Neurodiagnostics and Telehealth at Tift Regional Medical Center, recounted the following (paraphrased) story:
Eight years ago Tift had purchased their first batch of telemedicine equipment. For the first year or so they mostly stared at it, with no idea how to go about using it.
They wondered whether they could be reimbursed for anything they used it for and whether they could figure out how to use it and wondered what it could do. They weren’t using their equipment. They weren’t using telemedicine.
Then Jeff said they decided to “put the patients first.” They purposefully forgot about reimbursement, coverage regulations, computer abilities of the doctors, or whether the possible uses fit into the business plan of the hospital. They focused on finding out, through actually doing it, if telemedicine could help their patients. When that happened…
All those things took care of themselves.
Or, as Jeff put Read more
reprinted with permission by Mobile Cloud Era
Photo: By Tim Evanson, [CC BY-SA 2.0], at Flickr
In a merger of telehealth, mobile and cloud, Massachusetts-based swyMe is offering video conferencing in ambulances. The basic system includes three cameras in the vehicle: a standard “fish eye” 360º camera mounted high on the ambulance wall; a webcam attached to a touch screen monitor; and a handheld HDTV 720p IP camera.
The combination of the three affords a remote physician a view of the overall situation in the ambulance, the ability to communicate face-to-face with attending EMS workers and capability to zero in to close-up views of the patient. The system is HIPAA compliant and uses AES256 security.
swyMe COO Jeff Urdan explained that Read more
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The seeds of this article began when my CEO forwarded a Gartner case study from 2008[1]with the question, “If a hospital could do 345,000 video visits up to 2007, why hasn’t telemedicine expanded more? Is the issue technological, cultural, managerial, or..?”
Fantastic question. The issue definitely isn’t technological–at least from a capabilities standpoint. It may be from a design standpoint…but more on that later. I’d argue that it is indeed cultural and managerial, although some of that culture and management reflects back on us, the telemedicine solution providers.
We are presented with a quandary: 1) Where telemedicine has been systematically implemented, it has radically improved patient care, lowered costs, improved doctor/staff morale, and even increased revenue…even in the face of lingering payor reimbursement questions currently being worked out by insurers and state legislatures, and yet… 2) Adoption by both individual healthcare providers and organizations has been, well, lackluster, and often outright resisted.
The gap is caused because Read more
The question of reimbursement is very, very important. But not as important as you might think. As promised a couple weeks ago, we want to look more in depth at the third of our takeaways from the 2014 American Telehealth Conference…especially in light of new developments that have popped up in the news since then.
First, to bring new readers up …read more…
Last Thursday I promised to discuss our takeaways from the ATA conference individually in more detail, starting with
#1 We’re past the tipping point.
I won’t belabor the point of the overall importance of this takeaway, as you can read about it here. However, I will re-quote ATA CEO Jonathan Linkous because his numbers make a good launching point: “Today, 20 million Americans get some part of their healthcare remotely, and that number will grow as telemedicine expands its reach.” And the ATA President, Edward Brown, believes that mHealth/Telemedicine will grow by 50% every year.
According to a study by IHS Technology and published in January, the almost 350,000 telehealth patients in 2013 will swell to Read more
