Moving Beyond EMRs to Sustainable Business Models for Telecare

Med-e-Tel 201014-16 April 2010, Luxembourg.
Dr. Mark Blatt, Global Director of Health Industry Solutions for Intel's Digital Health Group will present his views on sustainable business models for telecare/telehealth and on telemedicine as the preferred model of care for the 21st century at Med-e-Tel 2010. This presentation will be part of a morning plenary session at Med-e-Tel on Thursday April 15th.

"Three years ago, telecare was about EMRs. Today, the world has embraced EMRs as proven technology to improve quality and efficiency and healthcare providers are willing to pay for it," says Dr. Blatt. He is convinced however that, looking to the future, EMRs can form the basis for care beyond the hospital and in this way intersect with telemedicine and telehealth. By this reasoning, sustainable business models where telehealth technologies can be useful to patients can be thought of in four fundamental ways:

  • Chronic Disease Management at Home - decreasing more costly contact with healthcare systems in institutional settings (EDs, Surgeries, Hospitals)
  • ED Diversion: Safe and effective treatment by Home Telecare system, instead of admitting patient to hospital
  • Early Discharge (free up BDOC). Via use of a monitoring system. Stops the need for more hospitals as more conditions can be managed at home
  • Readmissions Prevention: If you have an acute exacerbation following discharge, how can Telehealth help avoid readmission?

In each of these cases the issue is not the technology, but how to coordinate care across the continuum and how to pay providers for the most effective care possible. 'Care coordination' is the answer.

Care coordination is more than just getting data. You need to have the ability to ask questions to patients. If their answers are not consistent with the pure data then you might not use the data to change therapies. Providers treat patients, and not data. Systems for collecting data are a good start, but what's really needed is a connection/trust with patients. Better video conferencing is a key element in gaining that trust. We know that people like video and it works.

For telehealth to scale, patients need to trust the systems, and social connections established by video is key to that trust. "We need to change patient behaviour to make telehealth successful and scalable," argues Dr. Blatt. "To support video conferencing, we need to drive national broadband initiatives (e.g. National Broadband Network initiative in Australia). Also needed are improved decision support, algorithms and knowledge based systems. Simply relying on the doctor to do what he or she did face-to-face, gets you the same inefficient and unscalable care you used to get but just via video."

Hospitals are currently reimbursed based on treatment given at the hospital. Sending patients home is better for everyone except the hospital. Hospitals need to be reimbursed for doing the right thing, not for volume.

Dr. Blatt will talk about payment reform models that include Accountable Care Organizations (ACOs) and Patient Centred Medical Home (PCMH) as well as 30 day rebundling payment for post discharge care. Payment reform goes hand in hand with business models that take advantage of the ubiquity of telehealth care delivery.

He will provide some examples and present case studies of efficiencies in care delivery in all four business models listed above and give examples of ongoing pilots and emerging business models world wide that take advantage of payment reforms and the new care delivery models noted above.

"Care coordination is imperative going forward if telemedicine business models are to succeed. Simple remote patient monitoring, etc. was a good start for telemedicine, but over two decades it has not scaled. By changing business models, healthcare policy and reimbursement, Telemedicine can and will scale as the preferred delivery model for the 21st century," according to Dr. Blatt.

For further information and registration, please visit:
http://www.medetel.eu

Related news articles:

About Med-e-Tel
Med-e-Tel focuses on ehealth and telemedicine applications and a wide range of other medical ICT applications and on the convergence of information and communication technology with medical applications, which lead to higher quality of care, cost reductions, workflow efficiency, and widespread availability of healthcare services.

The "Med" in Med-e-Tel stands for healthcare services (institutional and home based care, prevention and education) and for medical products and equipment (medical imaging equipment, monitoring devices, electronic health records, etc.).
The "e" stands for the electronic and IT industry and services (hard- & software, internet, e-mail, etc.).
The "Tel" stands for telecommunications (whether it is POTS, ISDN, wireless, satellite, videoconferencing, VoIP, or other).

For further information, please visit www.medetel.eu.

Most Popular Now

Philips and Medtronic Advocacy Partnersh…

Royal Philips (NYSE: PHG, AEX: PHIA), a global leader in health technology, and Medtronic Neurovascular, a leading innovator in neurovascular therapies, today announced a strategic advocacy partnership. Delivering timely stroke...

New AI Tool Predicts Protein-Protein Int…

Scientists from Cleveland Clinic and Cornell University have designed a publicly-available software and web database to break down barriers to identifying key protein-protein interactions to treat with medication. The computational tool...

AI for Real-Rime, Patient-Focused Insigh…

A picture may be worth a thousand words, but still... they both have a lot of work to do to catch up to BiomedGPT. Covered recently in the prestigious journal Nature...

New Research Shows Promise and Limitatio…

Published in JAMA Network Open, a collaborative team of researchers from the University of Minnesota Medical School, Stanford University, Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center and the University of Virginia studied...

G-Cloud 14 Makes it Easier for NHS to Bu…

NHS organisations will be able to save valuable time and resource in the procurement of technologies that can make a significant difference to patient experience, in the latest iteration of...

Start-Ups will Once Again Have a Starrin…

11 - 14 November 2024, Düsseldorf, Germany. The finalists in the 16th Healthcare Innovation World Cup and the 13th MEDICA START-UP COMPETITION have advanced from around 550 candidates based in 62...

Hampshire Emergency Departments Digitise…

Emergency departments in three hospitals across Hampshire Hospitals NHS Foundation Trust have deployed Alcidion's Miya Emergency, digitising paper processes, saving clinical teams time, automating tasks, and providing trust-wide visibility of...

MEDICA HEALTH IT FORUM: Success in Maste…

11 - 14 November 2024, Düsseldorf, Germany. How can innovations help to master the great challenges and demands with which healthcare is confronted across international borders? This central question will be...

A "Chemical ChatGPT" for New M…

Researchers from the University of Bonn have trained an AI process to predict potential active ingredients with special properties. Therefore, they derived a chemical language model - a kind of...

Siemens Healthineers co-leads EU Project…

Siemens Healthineers is joining forces with more than 20 industry and public partners, including seven leading stroke hospitals, to improve stroke management for patients all over Europe. With a total...

MEDICA and COMPAMED 2024: Shining a Ligh…

11 - 14 November 2024, Düsseldorf, Germany. Christian Grosser, Director Health & Medical Technologies, is looking forward to events getting under way: "From next Monday to Thursday, we will once again...

In 10 Seconds, an AI Model Detects Cance…

Researchers have developed an AI powered model that - in 10 seconds - can determine during surgery if any part of a cancerous brain tumor that could be removed remains...