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