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Healthcare IT

How to make telehealth more relevant

By Jianggan Li | 5 September 2011

For Ron Emerson, Global Director of Healthcare, Polycom, technologies keep evolving to give people more flexibility in using telehealth, especially in an age where governments and providers try their best to keep an ageing and chronically-ill population away from tertiary care.

Video compression technologies continue to evolve. Emerson says that ‘best quality video can now be available at the lowest bandwidth’.

The increasing availability of mobile solutions also changes the landscape – it allows nursing homes and home care to really take place. Emerson thinks tablets are currently underused in the healthcare sector, and the tablets now are much more user-friendly than their predecessors a number of years ago.

“The technologies also make video-enabled true unified communications possible,” comments Emerson.

Many government-driven telemedicine programmes fail to live a long life; Emerson says it is no secret that these programmes do not have a successful business model and die after the government grants run out. However, showing value has not been straight forward. Emerson categorises the value that a telemedicine programme needs to demonstrate into the following items: 1. Patient satisfaction – do patients like the technology? 2. Clinical efficacy – how well we can treat the patients remotely rather than face to face? 3. Business case and sustainability – development of clear metrics to measure the project, including for example decreasing number of transports, reduced rate of hospitalisation and increased productivity

“We generally need to do a better job to track the benefits of telehealth,” Emerson says. He adds that incentives need to be in place to ensure that the stakeholders’ goals are aligned with the organisational one.

“Incentivising and de-incentivising hospitals and clinicians based on their uptake would always make telehealth more attractive and investments more accountable,” says Emerson. “Providers would gradually integrate this additional way of keeping contact with patients to continue care.”

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