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…

I’ve been in a flurry of local activity for the last 10 days or so and every conversation has come back to this question:

“What are you doing to prepare yourself and your people to respond in real-time to the tidal wave of buyers, patients, learners, workers, and clients who are already online now shopping for what you have to offer?”

This little slide show does a masterful job of outlining the issues and some of the challenges facing people working in the arenas of telehealth, telemedicine, and the other domains covered by connected health.

But the issues are the same for people who want to learn from you online, people who want to buy houses from you online, people who want to work with you online, and clients who want you to consult with them online. Take a look:

So what’s your plan? How are you gearing up to serve digital consumers?

They’re already online looking for what they want. And if you want them to “meet” with you, you need to be able to meet them digitally. Virtually. Online.

If you’re not sure how to get started safely – and confidently – please let me help you start stepping through a simple way you can start using virtual meetings to serve e-buyers, e-patients, e-learners, and e-clients the way they want to be served by you!

Real-time virtual meetings aren’t rocket science, friends. And, if you’re not already using virtual meetings to empower digital buyers, digital patients, digital learners, and digital clients, time’s a’wasting… You’d better believe it: your competition is gearing up right now.

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.

I’m one of the millions of Americans who has health insurance that doesn’t cover my care. I pay premiums every month. Big premiums. And HealthNet of Oregon denies my claims, classifying me as a “special case.” This has been going on since I moved to Oregon three years ago. What HealthNet is doing to me is nothing short of highway robbery and I resent the hell out it, not just for me but for the thousands of other Oregonians and Californians that HealthNet holds hostage because we’ve got “pre-existing conditions.” If we drop their coverage, we’ll be uninsurable. That means we pay the Mafia every month, or force our out-of-work neighbors and the gasping local hospitals to pay for our care.

At the President’s request, I thought I’d explain my predicament to my Oregon Congressman this morning on the chance that I might motivate Mr. Walden to support national healthcare reform. I drove up for a face-to-face meeting. Needless to say, he wasn’t in the office. And, his staff member – a person who told us she’s not actually part of his legislative staff – gave me and a handful of other folks a fully lukewarm welcome.

Then she spent most of our time together explaining to us in a decidedly patronizing voice why it wasn’t Greg Walden’s job to support legislation that he didn’t agree with. She listened to the needs and concerns I brought to share, but made no effort whatsoever to make even one written note although she said she’d tell the Congressman. So much for making a trip for a face-to-face meeting with my elected representative at 9:30am on a Wednesday morning.

My next best option is canceling my so-called “insurance” and forcing local tax rolls to absorb my care. Maybe my Republican Congressman would rather explain to Oregonians why they’ll have to pay new taxes – or cancel even more essential government services - instead of telling them what he’s doing to protect them from the cost of not giving people like me a way to participate in a national plan that enables us to remain responsible for ourselves.

I drove back to Ashland, shaking my head over the stone wall I ran into in my face-to-face meeting and, on the other hand, celebrating the excitement I’m feeling in recent online conversations around cost-saving telehealth, telemedicine, and digital doctoring initiatives.

It’s not part of my preventative care regimen to allow my blood to boil. So, after I return next week from a quick trip to the Bay Area, I’ll be following the path with a heart. For the next several weeks I’ll be focusing on the explosion of new medical applications for virtual meeting tools and other kinds of social media in the delivery of cost-effective healthcare and longterm care.

To wet your whistle, take a peek at this spiffy new site called Hello Health. Hello Health is a group of doctors setting up a simple way to serve their patients in web conferencing rooms while also trying to make it easy for other docs to work with them. What a concept! Based in NYC, they call themselves the “ground-up healthcare revolution.”

Welcome from Hello Health on Vimeo.

No gigantic bureaucracy. No death panels. No end of patient-doctor-relationship-scenarios. At Hello Health, all you have to do is “friend” another doc to give them access to your records.

Do you suppose this group’s got something to teach others about simple civility, collaboration, and creativity in meeting patient needs?

Do you suppose this could be generalized in some way to meet American’s political needs? Maybe they could show some of our Congressmen what it means to “friend” all their constituents. You think?