Future of telemedecine #MassTLC

RealityFrontier was at MassTLC Innovation 2010. This year unConference brought together 600 experts, investors and entrepreneurs in Boston. I attended the “future of telemedecine” session. Tele-health is well suited to RealityFrontier capabilities in video content analysis.  

Future of telemedecine

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

More Information

More about the unConference format.

Cameo appearance!  Minute 5’11” on Bill Warner’s video.