Aetna, Telemedicine, and Hawaii?

Here is a good article from the NYT providing a balanced perspective on a new telemedicine implementation in Hawaii. It highlights how there are benefits for – are you ready for this? – all stakeholders – the patient, the provider, and the payor. Telemedicine applications offers great opportunity to us all.

Having spent my career in Information Technology, I readily recognize IT in and of itself is not a panacea, but when implemented in thoughtful, prudent, and selective ways within the healthcare domain,  it can successfully address the predominant issues of access for the insured/uninsured/under-insured, reduction of utilization, reduction of errors, and improved provider collaboration/information sharing.

Enabling the Patient Relationship

One of the biggest challenges (and opportunities) in rehab, whether many of us realize it or not, is the time the patient spends in between clinical visits. Communication ceases, continuity of care falls off a cliff, and as we know from the research, plan adherence is terrible. All of this impacts the patient’s ability to achieve their goals and subsequently, their perception of their care experience with us.

One of the benefits of telehealth is it provides us with the ability deliver care, monitor patient compliance, or interact with our patients at a distance and expanded the patient relationship beyond the walls of our clinic. People are online using services, educating themselves, watching video, interacting with others….shouldn’t we be online with them, enabling their participation in their own care?

Preventative care

Good interview w/ Senator Hawkin in Newsweek re: preventative care. The momentum builds – http://tinyurl.com/a43xsj

Our Purpose and 1st Blog

We founded Tx Xchange to address what we view as our industry’s (i.e. physical, occupational, and speech therapy) need to embrace software technology not just for administrative, scheduling or billing purposes, but for patient centric reasons. It is time to give our patients a better rehab experience, help them participate more actively in their own care, and deliver services to them through a channel they increasingly want – the web.

We can change the consumer’s, payor’s, and referring physician’s perception about rehabilitation, but to do so, we need to evolve the delivery of our services, address factors that impact the efficacy of our services (65% of our patients are partially or non-compliant with their plan), and distance ourselves from other professions that do not have the training we do.  Let’s bring evidence closer to the point of care and make it more usable for the therapist, let’s own the patient relationship post-discharge by providing new services we have the training to deliver, and let’s look even harder at our patients as customers.

There is so much business opportunity for us as a profession with the aging of the population. Let us not continue to cede it to others.

We look forward to an ongoing discussion and welcome your comments. Be healthy.

Interesting articles

Here are a couple of interesting reports on advantages and challenges with telehealth. Not specific to rehab, but the dots aren’t hard to connect.