Are you prepared to take advantage of opportunities to consult with your healthcare providers remotely? Do you know what it’s going to take to be prepared?

I’ve been following the development of this initiative in California for the last three years and I invite you to think of the post below as the starting gun … on a race that will have many heats.

How is telemedicine getting a foothold in your community? I’d love to hear more if you’re willing to leave a comment below…

Health care takes digital leap forward

By Bobby Caina Calvan bcalvan@sacbee.com

Imagine a doctor listening to the heartbeat of a patient half a world away. Or a young child opening wide into the peering lens of a high-definition camera. And doctors collaborating online, exchanging digital X-rays, MRIs and potential diagnoses.

Dr. Thomas Nesbitt, right, announces the birth of the California Telehealth Network by demonstrating a live linkup with three UC Davis Medical Center telemedicine locations. Using broadband technology, specialists will be able to assist local doctors in faraway communities.

Telemedicine’s future took another leap forward Tuesday with the launch of the California Telehealth Network, the most ambitious foray yet into the rapidly developing field that links doctors and patients via high-tech tools.

“What it means is that no matter where you are in this huge state, you’ll have access to the expertise you need and the best medical care,” said Dr. Thomas Nesbitt, director of the Center for Health and Technology for the UC Davis Health System.

Initially, just 50 clinics, hospitals and other health care providers in California will tap into a broadband network that could eventually link nearly 900 facilities statewide by the end of 2011.

“California is showing the way,” said Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger during a Tuesday ceremony at the UC Davis Medical Center.

The medical center will serve as the control center for the new network and will help the state develop its telemedicine infrastructure. The telehealth network is expected to cost $30 million, with about $22 million from the federal government as part of the Federal Communications Commission’s Rural Health Care Pilot Program, an effort to improve health care in rural America.

With the telemedicine network, more Californians, particularly those in far-flung areas, will have access to medicine’s best and brightest, Schwarzenegger said.

“It should not be a matter of how rich you are or where you live,” he said. “We are celebrating the future of medicine, also known as telemedicine.”

That future couldn’t come soon enough for the family of Rennee Wilson, a young Shasta County girl whose skull was fractured earlier this month during a traffic accident near Redding.

The 3-year-old was in need of immediate care, and the trip from Redding to the UC Davis Medical Center in Sacramento would have consumed precious hours and possibly exposed the patient to additional medical trauma.

Instead, using video cameras that streamed real-time images from Redding to Sacramento, doctors collaborated on saving the girl’s life. From 160 miles away in Sacramento, Dr. James Marcin, a UC Davis associate professor of pediatrics critical care, assisted the intensive care physicians in Redding.

Using the latest telemedicine technology, he consulted with his remote partners on digital images that revealed a fractured skull. He recommended the drugs to administer and even when the Redding doctors should remove the ventilator after she could breathe on her own.

“They needed my brains more than they needed my hands,” Marcin said.

The girl’s family was thankful that they didn’t need to travel to Sacramento for her critical care. “The technology was awesome,” said Phillip Potter, the child’s grandfather.

Telemedicine has been around for years. But until recently, much of the technology has been crude – landline phones that offered no video, dial-up Internet that took an eternity to transmit images or grainy black-and-white videos that were of little use to diagnose an ailing patient.

Today, broadband technology is allowing sophisticated instruments to tap into the Internet’s high-speed digital currents. For example, stethoscopes can be connected to equipment that allows a doctor to remotely listen to a heartbeat. Other equipment allows doctors to examine a wound or see into a patient’s mouth, ears and other parts of the body.

That means physicians now have the ability to treat a patient without ever being in the same room or physically touching them.

“When telemedicine started, no one knew what high-definition was,” said Nesbitt, the medical center’s technology director. “Now we can look into someone’s ear to get a clear picture of an eardrum and look directly into an eye.”

© Copyright The Sacramento Bee. All rights reserved.

I’m going to be speaking locally tomorrow with a group of nonprofit consultants about how they could begin using virtual meeting tools to generate new revenues in their businesses.

Experience levels vary widely, so I decided to make a little mindmap to illustrate the primary factors affecting our “individual” decisions about when to use virtual meetings in our work – and when not to.

It occurred to me, as I made the map, that others might find the format useful as you dig deeper into your work processes with co-workers, clients and suppliers.

It would be nice if we could just unilaterally decide to start using some of the virtual meeting tools to simplify our work and save us time and money without damaging crucial relationships.

But the truth of the matter is that we can’t start having virtual meetings alone. ;^) We need people to meet with, don’t we? And not everyone is working from the same beliefs, attitudes, and systems to keep things rolling in their organizations. Human beings meet in the ways that we’re used to meeting – because we’ve got systems built up around those ways. And, even if our habits, beliefs and processes are burning up irreplaceable resources, we can’t help but resist changing them. It’s human nature! Nevertheless, our beliefs, habits, attitudes and systems are going to need to shift – at least just a bit – if we want to reap the benefits available from virtual meetings. (If we could have just copied over our face-to-face practices and skills – as is – everyone would already be using these tools, wouldn’t they?)

Please feel free to link to this little map. Use it in your self-inquiry. Use it to support your inquiry with co-workers and clients. You’re going to need to talk carefully about which things might need to shift a bit so that everyone can SHARE the benefits and savings available when you start use real-time virtual meetings together to get stuff done. You, your co-workers, your clients, and even your suppliers – everyone stands to benefit. But only if you’re able to give each other what you need to perform – and stay motivated – when you’re not in the same place or even the same time.

So, which things need to shift in ways that won’t overturn your apple carts?

If you need help facilitating these kinds of internal conversations with co-workers or clients, I’d love to help.

And, if you’re all ready to start exploring some of the possibilities EXPERIENTIALLY, I’ve got two places left in the next Madhatters Tea Party 10-Week Group Coaching Program starting the week of July 5th. You can grab one of those spots for yourself by contacting me here: http://virtualmeetingstartup.com/contact.html. Do it today, though. This is a first-come first-served program and I wouldn’t want you to miss out on this opportunity.

Want the change. Be inspired by the flame where everything shines as it disappears.
- Rainer Marie Rilke

Okay, I’m breathing deliberately at my desk. I’m taking short walks and breathing deliberately. I’m meditating. I’m chanting. I’m practicing the Power of Now, the Law of Attraction and doing The Work. I’m crying. And I’m still not okay about watching, helplessly, as the Gulf of Mexico turns into a toxic waste site.

I grew up going to the Gulf on vacations to swim with my family from the time I was a tiny girl. Then, when I was a teenager, we moved to the west coast of Florida and my adolescence was spent swimming on Lido Beach and Longboat Key. I had a short stint up in Georgia while I went to college and started a family, but I always went home to the Gulf to find my bearings. And I took my kids there from the time they were little. Even when I moved to Austin, I made as many trips as possible to the east coast of Texas to immerse myself in my beautiful Gulf. My whole life, it’s been my holy water.

So, while I’m now living in southern Oregon, I might as well be right there on the coast of Louisiana because I FEEL what’s happening there – every second – deep in my heart. And I’m at my wit’s end. I feel angry, helpless, and so sad I can barely breathe.

And, the worst part is I’ve been telling myself I don’t know what I can do – from up here – to help. Friends, colleagues and clients tell me they’re feeling the same anger, helplessness and sadness. My friend and colleague, Sharon Drew Morgan, even wrote a totally wacky post in her biz blog this week about Aliens and their possible role in this tragedy.

In fact, it was Sharon Drew’s post that actually shook me out of the trance of helpless rage at BP for failing to take responsibility for what’s happening. The insanity of talking about aliens popped my attention over to my personal responsibility as a driver whose demand for gasoline to power my car continues to fuel BP’s race to produce oil to meet that demand – at any cost.

And here’s a fresh video about the cost. The real cost:

So, What Can We Do – From Right Where We Are – About the Disaster in the Gulf?
If you can watch that footage without wanting to vomit, you’re a better wo/man than I. I can barely stand to watch it. Because I loved those waters. I loved those fish. And I love every single shell that washed up on the pristine, white sands of those beaches  since I first set my little foot on them. I’ve been picking up shells from Gulf beaches since I was three years old – shells left by sea creatures who died a natural death in those waters.

I simply cannot physically go down to the Gulf right now to help with the clean up. I’ve had the same kind of financially challenging year that everyone else has and I don’t have the cash to take off work and drive or fly down there right now to help with the clean up in person.

But, I can do something from right here. I can stand up – in my full humanity – and lead sans  shame or embarrassment. Like this guy:

Who cares if I look like a fool to start with? This is our precious Gulf of Mexico!!

So, here’s my declaration:

I can – and I will – offer every day to help people who sell professional services learn to use virtual meetings to start delivering some of your services without having to get into your cars to drive somewhere just so you can sit down in a room to work with other people. Sometimes we have to, but we don’t always have to do this!!

I can – and I will – keep reminding people through this blog that until we all learn to use these tools in skillful ways, we are just blowing smoke when we open our mouths and speak about “greening” this economy or “saving the environment.”

It’s time now for us to walk our talk! Will you join me?

The Times They Are A’Changin’
If you don’t know how to use virtual meetings to work with clients and colleagues at a distance, you have no other choice but to walk, ride your bike, ride the bus, or get into your car – or fly – to work with other people! But not having another choice is simply no excuse when the tools to work collaboratively – and at a distance – are FREE and I’m here to help you learn to use them!

The truth of the matter is this: Until each of us knows enough to be able to exercise choice with our colleagues and clients – ie., to work virtually sometimes, using live meeting tools and Web 2.0 collaborative applications, whenever doing so won’t damage crucial relationships – each of us must take personal responsible for creating the tragedy in the Gulf.

It is our driving habits that are the driving force in the demand for oil production.
Along with BP and lazy, selfish congressional regulators, it is YOU AND I who must take full responsibility for what our unquestioned – frequently senseless – work routines and habits are now doing to drive the demand for oil that is killing the Gulf and the other precious oceans!

So, how about singing along with me and Don Henley and song-writer extraordinaire Bob Dylan (celebrating his 69th birthday this week)? How about learning to use virtual meeting tools? And how about starting NOW?

Want to Do More Than Just Sing?
I’m starting up a new Madhatter’s Tea Party Group Coaching Program in July. It’s going to be fun…and it’s just not that damn hard!

If you want to participate, contact me this week right here for a FREE 20-minute consultation: http://virtualmeetingstartup.com/contact.html.

And if not now, when? While we keep fiddling around, the Gulf is burning.

Speaking of fiddling, a million thanks to Diana Fairbanks whose wide-ranging, quirky intelligence and warm friendship brought both the Rilke poem and the Leadership Guy vid to my attention early Thursday. You can enjoy her eclectic taste in music here on her new station at Blip.fm as you ponder next steps….

This deceptively simple talk holds the keys to a whole new way of thinking about whatever we used to call “positioning.”

Using Simon Sinek’s way of looking at what’s true about my biz, I end up speaking about what I offer in a whole new way. What do you think?

In everything I do, I believe in finding the least expensive and fastest way to get things done well … so I have as much time and money as I can to take care of myself, friends, family, and community the way I want to. Without hurting other people – or the environment.

I get quick, inexpensive, high quality results by learning – continuously – about new ways people can use personal computers and the internet to connect with one another to get the best outcomes we can afford.

These days, I coach my peers (people who sell professional services) to use virtual meetings so we can extend our reach, save money, save time, and strengthen relationships with our clients. Without driving or flying around all the time.

Are you someone who wants this, too? Want to be my client?

(I also consult around social media use and help people reap big benefits from “cloud” computing apps and processes. I do those things from the same perspective: finding the least expensive and fastest way to get things done well. But that’s another conversation….)

If you’re someone who also believes that getting stuff done quickly, inexpensively, and well – without hurting other people or the environment – really matters… I offer a FREE 20-minute consultation here.

Use the link on the right-hand-side of the page to schedule a one-on-one virtual meeting with me and let’s talk about YOU and virtual meetings.

Here’s a pretty exciting report from last week’s Consumer Electronics Show. I’ve been talkin’ ’bout this…writin’ ’bout this…waitin’ for this…And now here it comes: 2010. Take a look here.

Get ready to launch your boat and head for the New World. Think: Columbus taking off from Spain across the Atlantic.

If you haven’t yet updated your idea of yourself from “watcher” to “full participant” in two-way conversations that happen from home – as well as from work – using something that looks like that thing we used to call the “TV Set,” it’s time to get started this year. Whether for conversations with your distant relatives and friends, your coworkers – or your doctor – pretty soon you’re going to be talking outloud to a TV screen in your home.  And then someone you know is going to be talking back at you.

From my perspective, the best thing about this is that we’ll be able to use video technology to be present with the people who matter most to us and free ourselves, from the passive consumption of broadcast media – including corporate-financed advertising of all kinds! WooHoo!

Think about all the people you’d enjoy being able to meet with from your living room:

- People you want to learn from
- People you want to play with
- People you can receive healthcare from
- People you work with
- People you want to serve
- People in your family you can’t travel to be with face-to-face
- People across the globe doing things you care about
- People…people…people…

The list can be as long as your curiosity and desire for engagement!

What do you think? Damn exciting, if you ask me… I was born before there were any one-way broadcast reception devices (called TVs) in our homes.

Who’s used one of these new telepresence systems in your living room already? Please share your experience with us here…

Standing in line at the market this morning, waiting to pay for my milk and muffins, I couldn’t help laughing out loud at the tabloid and magazine headlines promising fifty ways I could lose the body I’ve created with my choices over the last 6 weeks of holiday parties.

* 10 Best Weight-Loss Pills
* Strip Off 25 Lbs in Just 20 Days
* Drop 4 Dress Sizes Before Valentines!
* Revitalize Yourself for the New Year – in 1 Short Week
* 5 Exercises, 10 Minutes, 15 Days to Washboard Abs

You know this stuff! Maybe you still believe one of these will work…I don’t.

I’m old enough – and 2009 was tough enough – for me to skip pretending that one more quick recovery scheme will deliver anything but disappointment when it comes to my health. Or health care reform ;-(.

A Trustable Resource For Your 2010 Care-For-My-Health Plan
On the other hand, I am so excited about a live, online telehealth resource called EMindful that I want to open 2010 with the interview I did recently with the visionary founder and CEO of Emindful.com, Kelley McCabe, and her web class producer, David Lessak.

The interview runs about 35 minutes and it explores Kelley’s invention of Emindful and some of the ways she and David are using virtual meeting technologies to deliver a variety of telehealth services – including mindfulness training and live yoga classes.

(A MILLION THANKS! shout-out to my friend and partner-in-virtual-meeting-adventure-games, Tom Carroll, of EvolutionaryLearning.com, for his help recording this conversation with Kelly and David and helping me get it posted!)

WHAT A DELIGHTFUL IDEA! USING YOUR COMPUTER TO DO YOGA!
Among the handful of high-quality telehealth resources offered at EMindful, the one that impresses me most is the live online yoga classes with Kirpalu-trained yoga instructors.

Here’s a little screencast that shows briefly what an Emindful yoga class looks like.

While you may never have considered using your computer to do yoga, having the opportunity to work with a live, online instructor offers many benefits – distinct from using VHS or DVD recordings of yoga routines. Just off the top of my head, here are five:

1. You can develop a relationship with a live instructor who varies your daily practice – instead of leaving you repeating the same few postures over and over on a tape.
2. Both before and after class, your live instructor is available to answer individual questions about specific challenges you’re facing in your practice.
3. You can practice anywhere you can get online, using a desktop or laptop computer.
4. If you can’t attend a live session, you can access the class archive at a later time in the day to do the class when it’s most convenient for you.
5. If you don’t live within walking distance of a high-quality yoga studio, you can walk-your-talk about lowering your carbon footprint by not driving all over town for a one-hour daily class.

Access and Convenience
Despite the phenomenal growth of yoga and other Eastern health practices across the US, substantial chunks of the population still lack access to well-trained instructors. Not just in rural areas. Access issues abound in traffic-jammed urban areas, too. Some groups that could benefit from Emindful’s yoga workshops and classes include:

1. People whose jobs require them to travel so much that they can’t attend local classes at regular times and build up a steady relationship with a knowledgeable teacher.
2. Mothers who are temporarily home-bound caring for young children.
3. Aging Baby Boomers – or other caregivers – who are providing care for seniors and can’t leave them unattended for long.
4. People with transportation issues that prevent them from getting to regular local classes.

If you’re in one of these groups – or you know people who are – and you’d like for yoga to play a bigger role in your 2010 Care-For-My-Health Plan, I hope you’ll check out Emindful this week and take Kelly and David up on one of their special offers.

Emindful is certainly stretching the limits (sic) of what can be accomplished with virtual meeting technology – and that’s exciting! I’m wishing Kelley and David great luck in 2010 will be keeping an eye out for new offerings from them in the fast-moving connected health and telehealth markets.

What else can people do in virtual meeting rooms? We’re only beginning to scratch the surface, aren’t we? What a decade this is going to be!

I promised the next thing I would share here would be the telehealth conversation I had with Kelly McCabe, former Citibank exec turned CEO of eMindful.com. But I was in too big a hurry on my way out of Ashland and left the mp3 on my Mac at home. I’m on the road this week in Boston…

However…I just ran across two fascinating slide presentations.

The first is by Dr. Yannis Pappas of the Imperial College of London. The second is by George MacGinnis of the HNS in London. Despite the fact that the telehealth/telemedicine audience that’s starting to gather here on this blog might is mostly a US-centric group, I’m guessing you’ll still find both presentations quite useful. In many regards, we here in the US are way behind our European colleagues in the march towards simple, cheap and easy telemedicine solutions. My thanks to David Doherty of 3GDoctor.com for sharing these shows at LinkedIn.

Dr Pappas’ presentation is full of solid data and elegant, simple ways to look at the multi-level challenges of transitioning from face-to-face patient care practices to virtual appointments. 

It’s true. The obstacles and challenges of moving appropriate types of healthcare online are difficult. But not impossible. Especially when you’ve got help from communication and management experts who understand both the vagaries and complexities of changing business processes and the subtleties of how human beings either build trust and respect when we communicate – or disrupt both terribly. Face-to-face and online.

I’m passionate about helping doctors and patients meet each other halfway between their computers and get more out of meeting that way than they’ll spend preparing themselves to do so from now on.

George McGinnis presentation below lays out an easily understandable visual map of how we need active, independent seniors with chronic health conditions and people being supported in assisted living facilities to connect more easily with families, caregivers, and healthcare providers using remote technologies. Again, thanks to David Doherty for sharing this show on his profile at LinkedIn.

As I’m fond of saying, this isn’t rocket science, folks. Patient groups, healthcare providers, tool makers and consolidators…It would be my great pleasure to help you move forward, regardless of what the government does or doesn’t get accomplished with regard to “healthcare reform.” Where would you like to start?

My fascinating conversation with Kelly McCabe coming next week…

I really wish I had three bodies so I could finish all the things I’ve started lately. I don’t have three bodies. If I even had two bodies, I would send one of them to the E-Patient Connections Conference the third week of this month in Philadelphia.

Why? I’m getting more excited everyday at the innovative uses of virtual meeting tools unrolling daily in the telehealth and telemedicine arenas! The possibilities for patients and doctors to get together whenever and wherever and however works best for both parties are multiplying exponentially – with or without government healthcare reform!

I’ve been talking with innovators daily and canning some interviews you can expect to start enjoying here by the end of this week.

Until then, take a look at this vid and tell me if it doesn’t give you hope, too…

Connectedness by Ayesha Hilton

Cutting the Chord (Click here for video.)

When you’re sick, you’re sick. And for many people being sick brings with it a powerful desire to be in close touch with your doctor until you feel well.

If YOU don’t have that desire – or maybe especially because you don’t – your family members are likely to have it twice as bad FOR YOU.

Well, mobile medical technologies are poised to make a much stronger link between you and your healthcare providers lot more possible than you might ever have imagined. Wireless healthcare devices and systems can make it downright simple for you to be monitored in all kinds of ways from well outside the walls of doctor’s offices and hospitals.

In case you missed it, this tight, meaty conversation  took place on August 28, 2009, on CNBC, between Hewlett Packard’s Executive VP of the Personal Systems Group, Todd Bradley, Qualcomm CEO Paul Jacobs, and Dr. Eric Topol, Scripps Health Chief Academic Officer. The focus is wireless healthcare and mobile medicine initiatives that the big boys have been readying for market even while the economy has been languishing.

So, how would you like to be feeling better connected to your healthcare team? And in what ways?

Dreaming is about to be believing… Take a look:  Cutting the Chord (Click here for video.)

I signed another online petition today. Ho-hum.

So what’s new?

Well, this petition encourages Congress to expand support for telemedicine – a topic that’s pretty darned important to me – and a lot of other people – from 3 different perspectives.

1. From the first perspective, I have a chronic illness, Type 2 diabetes. And it’s not going to go away. I do all I can to manage it with diet and exercise and it’s still progressing. Not fast. But, caring for myself – since my insurer has excluded almost all my meds, supplies, and doctor care – is slowly but surely bankrupting me. So, any way I can contain the costs to get the appropriate, competent care I’m going to need for the rest of my life sounds good to me. And telehealth initiatives would do that.

2. From the second, I live in a relatively rural area now where access to medical care requires relatively long drives and long waits because there’s a shortage of doctors in relation to the number of folks who live here. Telehealth initiatives would help with this, too, providing access to specialists without the need for so much travel.

3. From the third perspective, I’m “The Virtual Meeting Coach,” and I KNOW that with the right training and dependable broadband internet access, it’s 100% possible for people to meet with each other – without being co-located – and get as good or better results than they can  meeting face-to-face.

In no way am I advocating that any of us gets rid of our primary docs or that insurers fleece us further by pushing delicate diagnostic processes into virtual meeting rooms. But I do believe that both doctors and patients can benefit tremendously from meeting more often – and less expensively – using virtual meeting technologies to address hundreds of health conditions and long term care.

(This is why I’ve offered to build the Cloud Computing skills of my neighbors at Mountain Meadows, for starters. In this rural part of southern Oregon, there’s a shortage of doctors and skilled caregivers and my neighbors need to be comfortable using computers to extend their networks of care -  including having online conversations with specialists and distant family members!)

I’ve been complaining for three years now about how insane it is for me to repeat this routine four times a year: I drive 40 miles round trip to get a blood draw. Then, 10 days later, drive another 40 miles round trip, wait for 20 minutes in a waiting room, and then sit down for 15 minutes with my doc while she reads the computer printout on the blood work to me. The costs in wasted time, fuel, and dollars are ridiculous. It insults my human intelligence and my doctor’s, too! It would be common sense for me to get a local blood draw, have the tests processed and sent to my doc electronically, and then meet with her in a virtual meeting room to go over the results with her instead.

But that would mean we’d be venturing into the “experimental” arena of telemedicine! Oh no, Mr. Bill!

Oh yes, Mr. Bill!! I’m excited about the petition I signed today at Telehealth4us.com because the group there is a web-based coalition focused on getting health leaders to make maximum advantage of telehealth for improving Americans’ health.

As they report:

“After 50 years of demonstrations and research and over 10,000 studies published on the impact of telehealth, there is widespread agreement on its ability to save lives and money  while increasing access to care. Patients like it, it improves care and it expands access. Moreover, it can reduce costs.”

Among the bigger benefits of telehealth/telemedicine are better management of chronic diseases, better sharing of health specialists, fewer hospital stays and re-admittances, and reduced patient and provider travel times.

Studies indicate that the use of telemedicine for monitoring of chronic care patients or allowing specialists to provide care to patients over a large region have resulted in significantly improved quality of care.

And consumers want it. Patient satisfaction with the use of telemedicine to access care and the use of telecommunications technologies to connect with specialists and other health care providers to meet unmet health needs is consistently high.

Estimates of annual net cost savings to Medicare resulting in the widespread adoption of telemedicine services range from $2 billion to over $4 billion per year, according to various studies, including the Arthur D Little report, “Can Telecommunications Help Solve America’s Health Care problems?” and “Outcomes of an Integrated Telehealth Network Demonstration Project,” published as far back as 2003 in Telemedicine Journal and e-Health.

So, what’s the hold up?

Good question. And everyone’s got a little different answer.

Over the next several weeks I’m going to be interviewing  a variety of interesting people who are involved with the design and delivery of different telemedicine initiatives. I’ll be sharing clips from the conversations here and offering a set of the complete interviews for sale.

So stay tuned.

It’s clear to me that telemedicine can have a widespread and transforming impact on the cost, quality, delivery, and health outcomes for all people.

And frankly, given the demographic I’m part of (we aging Baby Boomers are going to break the bank with our healthcare), I can’t think of a better application of virtual meeting technologies than preventative health education and telemedicine.

Have you already had experiences with telemedicine – as a doc? As a patient? I’d love to talk with you about them…

Leave a comment below and I’ll get right back to you.