Tag Archives: telecare

The Virtualization of Care

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This year’s World Congress Leadership Summit on Telemedicine features a great lineup of speakers. Joining innovators from major hospitals and healthcare delivery organizations, we’re excited to hear about the industry-wide interest and demand for telemedicine use in care delivery.

One of the more interesting sessions was the keynote panel discussion on the Joslin Diabetes Center’s ‘Joslin Everywhere’ diabetes mobile health initiative and efforts to virtualize the delivery of care.

Panelists included Chief Medical Officer Martin Abrahamson, Chief Information Officer Ed Charbonneau and WebCare Program Manager Paul Penta. The focus of their panel was on efforts to improve quality, extend their specialist reach by supporting providers at affiliate sites, improving clinical metrics and collaboration with partners in the healthcare field. Through the use of new and innovative tools to train and engage patients to promote better care management, Joslin is establishing itself as a leader in diabetes care and ensuring care anywhere and ‘everywhere.’

Stay tuned for more updates throughout and after the conference.

This Week: SBR Health at the WHITv7.0 Conference

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I’m onsite in Vienna, VA for two days attending the World Healthcare Innovation and Technology (WHIT) conference and thought I would share some highlights of the first day with our readers.

Todd Park, Chief Technology Officer, U.S. Department of Health and Services, kicked off the event, giving a fantastic, animated and passionate keynote on a confluence of market and health policy forces that have created an extraordinary environment for health innovation. I especially like his insightful remarks on how information liberation – new initiatives allowing patients to download and transfer their own data – is creating especially significant opportunities for entrepreneurs.

Vivian Funkhouser, principle of Health IT at Motorola, spoke about issues around managing the exploding number of devices to use in acute care settings. Her talk focused on the need to create scalable wireless infrastructures and multiple use devices.

Expanding on this topic, Brian Wells, an Associate Chief Information Officer for the University of Pennsylvania Health System talked about mobile device adoption within the health system and what they are doing to support the iPad is the device of choice. He asserted their users are overwhelmingly wanting iOS enabled applications – in fact, not one person has come to him to ask why applications were not being supported on Android or RIM devices. Brian also found that support issues for the iPad applications they have deployed are extremely low – iPad users generated .05 calls per user over 6 months. However, getting wider adoption of the devices is not without it’s challenges – one of the biggest issues he is facing is that their system just spent millions of dollars to put PCs in patient rooms for the physicians to use. So, it is still an uphill fit to convince leadership to purchase and deploy more mobile devices like the iPad. If he had it his way, Brian stated he would replace all the COWS (computers on wheels) with iPads!

In the afternoon, Will Yu, Special Assistant of Innovations and Research Office of the National Coordinator (ONC) spoke on how now is the best time to innovate in healthcare, as the market and incentives are aligned. He elaborated on how his office is attempting to create the ecosystem for their programs to be coordinated with healthcare innovator’s efforts, outlining their innovation framework which is based on communication, collaboration and support.

Closing the day with a well presented keynote, Paul Grundy, MD, the Global Director of Healthcare Transformation, IBM, spoke on new delivery models to drive down costs and improve care, focusing primarily on giving a very compelling argument for the Primary Care Medical Home model. He had perhaps one of the best and shortest definitions for a PCMH I have heard to date:

“A relationship based team with a project manager.”

One of the more poignant remarks he made to show how bad our current state of medical care coordination was that his cat is in a care registry so that no vaccinations missed, but his wife has to remember to get her own mammograms scheduled.

I’d be interested to hear your feedback on that last remark in the comments section.

That’s it for today – please check back tomorrow when I’ll report on some of the highlights for day two. –Peter Eggleston, Chief Marketing Officer SBR Health Inc.

The Maribel Foundation: LA Children’s Hospital and Telemedicine

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Some may know her for her memorable characterization of Selena, others may remember her vast and ever changing music career, and most are just getting acquainted with Jennifer Lopez in the latest season of American Idol, but no matter how you know her, Jennifer Lopez, better known as J.Lo, is doing something worth remembering. Partnering up with her sister, Lynda, the pair founded the Maribel Foundation, their mission:

That’s why Lynda and I are working to create the Maribel Foundation. Our goal is to dramatically increase the availability of quality health care and health education for women and children, regardless of their ability to pay.

While this goal is no small task, they’ve taken it a step further and announced to launch a Telemedicine campaign, mainly in Los Angeles’ Children’s Hospital.

Jennifer and Lynda Lopez at the Telemedicine Launch in San Juan

Information from their Website:

The Foundation will work to expand the number of telemedicine clinics both domestically and abroad, increasing access to top quality pediatric care for the most serious cases. Telemedicine is a remarkable new healthcare delivery system that uses telecommunications technology to conduct medical diagnoses, consultations, treatments, transfers of data, education of physicians, and dissemination of public health alerts and/or emergency updates.

Simply stated, this technology allows patients located all over the world to receive access to care by the physicians at one of America’s top pediatric hospitals, the Childrens Hospital Los Angeles.

Patients living in under-served and under-privileged areas, two groups that are especially vulnerable to inadequate healthcare, can greatly benefit from telemedicine.

Some of the potential benefits of telemedicine are as follows:

Access: Telemedicine can allow children with serious childhood diseases in other areas of the world to be examined, diagnosed, and/or treated by the top pediatric oncologists, hematologists, and pediatricians at the Childrens Hospital Los Angeles. Doctors can virtually give patient care to children in different parts of the world.
Quality: Telemedicine permits consultations to take place among the referring physician, the consulting physician, the patient, and the patient’s family through interactive video and medical equipment and instruments, with the added benefit of having critical patient information available on-line. Additionally, the physicians or other personnel at remote or under-served locations can be educated before or during the consultations with specialty physicians and other experts, increasing their ability to treat other similar cases in the future.
Cost: The travel cost of the patients for specialty care, the travel cost of the health care professionals for continuing education or consultation, the personnel / equipment cost for not having to keep specialty care facility in rural or under-served hospitals, and other costs can be either eliminated or reduced.
To learn more about their campaign, watch the video here: Maribel Foundation