Telemedicine, which includes remote consultation, diagnosis and study interpretation, continues to grow despite some consumer’s edginess about virtual doctors. I’ve actually seen one, a doctor on the other side of the screen, and I’ll admit it’s weird; sitting in a clinical setting talking at the above-the-neck version of someone in a tie who I’ve never met. But telemedicine is providing important services and helping cut costs across the medical industry. Over time we’re bound to grow more comfortable with the interconnectedness of treatment the same way we have with banking and conferencing.
Far from my experience of sitting in a chair and talking to a monitor, one health group operating in the western states is using actual robots that stand about five feet tall and serve as mobile data/video links. The units, placed in hospitals and care centers in rural areas, provide an important link to specialists when time is of the essence. For a stroke patient that can mean the difference between full recovery, paralysis, and even death. The robots can be remotely navigated around treatment centers so a doctor can log on from anywhere, direct the robot to a patient’s room and check in any time they want.
CEO of Net Medical Xpress, the telemedicine company who just launched a new WebRTC telemedicine conference tool, thinks there is great promise for patients in remote treatment. “The ability of healthcare providers to use the iPhone, iPad, Mac and PC for telemedicine is important because it will ultimately help millions of patients while trimming healthcare costs. This is a new version of the house call that will work well for patients and enable doctors to provide better care to more patients, an important issue in modern medicine. The receiver version is already available in the Apple App Store.” In New Mexico, where Net Medical is based, there are twenty-five rural hospitals with limited access to specialists. A new partnership with the University of New Mexico will provide neurology support services via Net Medical as part of the University’s stroke intervention work.
Remote systems like these work because the robot, screen or WebRTC links patient and doctor visually and gives the provider access to patient records and imaging. A nurse or medical assistant in the room is able to transcribe doctor instructions and perform any necessary hands on work the doctor might ask for. In a normal face to face consult doctors are doing much more looking than most of us realize, evaluating things like our demeanor, pallor and motions for clues about conditions and symptoms, so these face to face systems provide what a phone consult never could.
But personal consults are just one aspect of telemedicine and by far the most controversial. Most of us never knew who interpreted our x-ray or EKG results anyway, so we have no qualms about whether the person doing it now is in the hospital or thousands of miles away. For Net Medical Xpress, their cardiology and radiology reading service is up sixteen percent over last year-to-date, with gross income nearing three million dollars. But a newer division of specialists, providing telemedicine services in cardiology, neurology, critical care, pulmonology and other specialties is growing fast, up an astonishing 269% over last year third quarter earnings. And the company is bound to grow, because for a patient in need the best doctor is the one who can be there when they need it most.
Edited by
Cassandra Tucker
