MassTLCH1 | The Future of Telemedicine

From Raphael Cariou. Twitter: @realityfrontier

What helps in building up a telemedecine solution?

· A sales team needs to employ the services of a medical doctor as doctors are trusting doctors.
· The solution provider needs to get involved as closely as possible to medical trials.

What are the key contributing factors for the adoption of a telemedecine solution?

· Facilitate the relationship between doctor and patients.

· Move data collected remotely where it belongs.

What are the barriers to adoption?

· Cost of entry for following up with some categories of patients such as diabetics, obese, etc.

· Cost of putting a solution together as it involves the participation of medical practitioners and technology providers. Seen from the medical team standpoint, it often costs less to work with college students.

· Reticence of medical professionals to adopting new technology as it is perceived as getting in the way of caring for patients.

How to get into the telepresence market?

· Understanding the re-imbursement mechanism is a key factor as it drives the incentive for medical practices.

· A solution provider would have to build a model of a medical practice cash flow that would account for the new technology cost.

· Identifying the right buyer is critical and may require some consolidation. An individual doctor may not buy in.

· Understanding the end-to-end care scenario is also critical. The reason why a black box is useful for home healthcare is that nurses are working on a prospective pay where additional visits are not paid for.

What are the key metrics?

· Improving the quality of care

· Reducing the cost of care

What are examples of technology that best fits telemedecine?

· SMS is preferred as there are not that many Smartphones in use.

· It does not need to be real-time for some fields, such as dermatology.

· Any technology that helps in submitting measures for bonuses in the field of evidence-based medicine.

· Help in collecting enough data to define a norm for a particular scenario, and in identifying when there is a variation from the norm.

· Note: HIE is orchestrating the anonymous collection of data.

What is evidence-based medicine measured on?

· Primarily focused on processes rather than medical data

· Currently more used to compare performances of medical practices

· There is no mechanism currently that would be close to a consumer report