Healthcare Matters

Despite the pedigree of the device makers that include brands like Intel, AT&T, GE and Honeywell, none of them are making any money in telemedicine. The cynics always say: “Follow the money.” And that is the problem. The road to the kind of meaningful pay off the industry has been patiently waiting for is a dead end. It must lead to a payer(s) of scale and commitment or telemedicine is going to continue to flounder.

No one has stepped up.

The FCC recently announced its decision to allocate spectrum for Mobile Body Area Networks (MBANS). Call it one more piece of the puzzle, as it should definitely help. But the most important piece remains missing. In the end, it doesn’t matter how advanced the technology; how impressive, reliable and affordable the solutions are; or how much money the providers can save; telemedicine doesn’t yet have a “baseline” with the payers, so the market can’t move.

Of course, it will eventually move. Indeed, the payers will likely trip over each other in the midst of their collective epiphany, but the innovators may not last long enough to reap their just rewards.

The Danish National Telemedicine Strategy continues to develop around a set of core recommendations. And these recommendations aren’t just appropriate for a relatively small (relative to the U.S.) country. To the contrary, most everything about telemedicine scales beautifully.

Here’s a sampling:

• Funding to maximize penetration of telemedicine solutions;
• Financial incentives for adopting telemedicine treatment;
• Binding goals for using existing video conferencing platforms (for translation, doctors’ conferences, visits, control, discharging conferences and telepsychiatric consultancies);
• Wound treatment from a centralized wound treatment center for all municipalities;
• National prioritization of chronic diseases to be addressed by telemedicine;
• Financial models for development and support of a common IT-infrastructure;
• National standards and reference architecture for e.g. security, clinical data and booking;
• Citizens get easy access to healthcare data, and self reported data are used in healthcare (i.e. EHR integration).

Chronic disease management isn’t the only general application area. Busy young professionals with treatable conditions, parents seeking care confirmations for their sick children, prescription processes and elderly patients who compromise their own care due to the difficulties they have with transportation, etc., …the list seems endless. In addition, physicians who adopt the use of telemedicine may actually have a vehicle that gets them paid for more of their time.

So what’s the problem? The American Telemedicine Association (ATA) is working on it. But surely, under these circumstances, the industry would be best served by unifying its lobbying efforts and finding some champions on the Hill. There’s always time to showcase technologies.

—Tom Finn