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.
