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telemedicine

Female doctor in her surgery office with headset in front of her laptop, an x-ray of a foot in hand, talking with a senior patient, telemedicine concept

Trend Spotting: Are Local Care Providers Losing the Telehealth Platform Wars?

by Vince Kuraitis, JD and Randall Williams, MD

Two recent surveys shed light on the issue of patient loyalty to local care providers for telehealth visits. While the findings are mixed, local providers should be concerned about how they’re faring in the telehealth platform wars. Let’s take a look at both surveys.

Early Evidence Suggested Patients Preferred Their Own Providers for Telehealth Visits

Early evidence suggesting patient loyalty to their own providers was shown by The COVID-19 Healthcare Coalition Telehealth Impact Study Work Group. Their survey asked about telehealth encounters between March 1, 2020 and January 30, 2021 and included 2,007 respondents.

As shown in the graphic below, the findings demonstrated that a vast majority of telehealth services were taking place with “my own provider” (ranging from 71% for 18-30 year olds to 83% for those 65 or older) or “another provider in my own provider’s practice (ranging from 5 to 8%).

Dogged Optimism: Five Innovative Aspects of HITECH

If you’re a dog (an innovator), what’s there to smile about over HITECH?  Quite a bit.

In the first post of this series, I suggested that HITECH favors cats by about 60/40 and noted that the single most cat-like feature of HITECH is providing incentives for physicians and hospitals to acquire and implement EHRs  — but only EHRs. Reader “Mark” commented:

“How does this work out to 60/40? Looks to me like 100% cats.”

Let’s look a bit deeper to see how HITECH […]

Data Incompatibility Remains A Barrier to Remote Patient Monitoring (RPM) Devices Reaching the Mainstream

The Continua Health Alliance is doing a good job in getting remote patient monitoring (RPM) devices to become plug-n-play — where devices and peripherals from different manufacturers complying with Continua Guidelines will be able to talk to one another.

Continua’s work-to-date is a necessary, but not yet sufficient effort to make RPM devices mainstream.

Knocking down the barrier of device-incompatibilty exposes the bigger barrier of lack of data interoperability among RPM technologies and between RPM devices and health care IT systems.  Jonathan Edwards, […]

Health Wonk Review at e-CareManagement

Welcome!

Since this is my first time hosting the Health Wonk Review, I really didn’t know what to expect.  I have to say that I’ve learned a lot while poring over the insight and wisdom of my fellow bloggers. Fortunately, this week’s entries fell into neat categories:

In-Store Clinics
Physicians
Problems — U.S. & World Health Systems
Solutions — U.S. & World Health Systems
Cats, Dogs and Kangaroos

Just in case that last category, doesn’t look too familiar, let’s revisit the whole point of the Health Wonk Review:

Health Wonk […]

Cardiac Monitoring System: “Go Directly to the Nearest Hospital, Do Not Pass Go, You Are Having a Heart Attack”

NOT science fiction.

A Bluetooth heart monitor could text your local hospital if you are about to have a heart attack, according to research published in Inderscience’s International Journal of Electronic Healthcare. The device measures electrical signals from the heart, analyses them to produce an electrocardiogram (ECG) and sends an alert together with the ECG by cell phone text message. Portable heart monitor sends emergency alerts and ECG as text message, Virtual Medical Worlds, August 2007

Original article: Design of wearable cardiac […]

Mathematica Researchers Summarize Disappointing Results Across 4 Medicare DM Demonstrations

Presenting at the Annual Academy Health Research Meeting earlier this week, representatives from  Mathematica Research and CMS (Centers for Medicare and Medicare Services) presented findings across several Medicare disease management (DM) demonstration/pilot programs. 

Again, the findings show minimal evidence of success in any of the Medicare DM programs. Several of the slides from Randall Brown of Mathematica cut to the chase:

Links: May 29, 2007

More information on LifeComm, the QUALCOMM sponsored health care MVNO

Qualcomm Announces Healthcare MVNO, Medical Connectivity Consulting blog; May 23, 2007

Qualcomm: Mobilizing healthcare through LifeComm, Fierce Wireless; May 23, 2007

What makes an MVNO stick?, Mobile Diner; May 22, 2007

New Emerging MVNO Business Model, TeleBusillis; May 22, 2007 

Qualcomm’s LifeComm Lifestyle, Maperture; May 21, 2007 

Qualcomm boosts efforts in wireless healthcare with LifeComm MVNO, ReThink; May 21, 2007

Are All U.S. MVNOs Doomed to Fail; inbabble.com; May 20, 2007

Wireless-Life Sciences: About WLSA, Wireless Life […]

Evidence for Remote Patient Monitoring (RPM): The Glass is More than Half Full

Over the years, there have been a number of meta-analyses examining hundreds of studies relating to effectiveness of RPM.  The latest one of these is Systematic Review of Home Telemonitoring for Chronic Diseases: The Evidence Base, published in the May/June 2007 issue of the Journal of the American Medical Informatics Association (JAMIA).

My colleague Tim Gee, respected fellow blogger and world renowned connectologist, summarizes this latest study under the headline “Impact of Remote Monitoring Still Inconclusive”.

Tim, I’m concerned that folks might draw […]

Links: April 1, 2007

Telemedicine in the Ambulatory Setting: Trends, Opportunities and Challenges

First Consulting Group, March 2007

 

New Technologies For Chronic Disease Management And Control: A Systematic Review

Journal of Telemedicine and Telecare, March 2007

 

Systematic Review of the Chronic Care Model in Chronic Obstructive Pulmonary Disease Prevention and Management