One sector of healthcare IT that will be worth watching over the next few years is telehealth. From the sounds of my recent chat with Jonathan Linkous, the CEO of the American Telemedicine Association, the industry is on the brink of explosive growth.
Jonathan Linkous
The fervor from Linkous is complemented by a recent report by the research firm RNCOS, which estimated the growth of the telemedicine industry to be at approximately 19 percent, compounded annually, from 2010 to 2015. With RNCOS’ research stating the market was at $9.8 billion in 2010, the industry could certainly be headed for an unprecedented boom.
In our chat, Linkous explains seven trends that he says will shape the telemedicine industry over the next few years. All of the trends seemed to have significance, but to me, the most important one is the shift in healthcare from a fee-for-service to the managed care model. This shift, Linkous says, will allow for the decision to use telemedicine in a clinical setting go from payers to physicians. As it stands, government and private payers are reluctant to use telemedicine because of cost issues.
Linkous is confident once this decision is in the hands of practitioners, the use of telemedicine will increase in a variety of medical settings. This one trend could very likely represent the first domino that will fall in the favor of telemedicine. Use of telemedicine is likely to become a standard of care once more physicians use it and then you’ll start to see more remote clinical enterprises pop up.
If Americans are wary of the impact of teleheleath, they need not look far for a country that is using the practice correctly. Our neighbor across the Atlantic, the U.K., is in the process of installing three million remote patient monitoring devices in the homes of patients across the country. This project, called 3ML (Three Million Lives), comes after the country’s national health department conducted a comprehensive study involving 6,000 chronically ill patients. From the study, the U.K. Department of Health concluded telehealth led to a 45 percent reduction in mortality rates.
From a recent report, it was learned the Brits were actually inspired by the U.S. Veterans Health Administration (VHA) telehealth program in creating 3ML. That begs an obvious question, if the VHA has done it well and Britain want to copy that success, why hasn’t more happened here? Perhaps once the managed care model comes into favor, we’ll know the answer.
