A recent Intel survey found that 89 percent of healthcare executives expect telemedicine to transform healthcare within the next decade.
Telemedicine expands the reach of healthcare by extending services into rural areas, which have more incidences of chronic illnesses like diabetes. Also, telemedicine has the potential to help providers cut healthcare costs. Remote monitoring, for example, could cut hospital, outpatient and pharmacy costs by as much as 30 percent.
Most importantly, telemedicine enables better healthcare service delivery. One study found that telemonitoring could cut the mortality rate of heart failure patients by 20 percent. Telestroke tools deliver correct stroke diagnoses 96 percent of the time compared to telephone consultations, which deliver correct diagnoses only 83 percent of the time.
Because telemedicine has so much to offer, hospitals, specialists and medical providers need to find ways to integrate the technology into their practices. WebRTC provides a fast and affordable way to make the telehealth leap.
Deploying telemedicine via WebRTC requires no specialized equipment purchases. Instead of investing in room-sized conference systems and expensive video equipment, doctors can invest in a few tablets, improve their broadband connections and use WebRTC to make voice and video calls, conference with other doctors, send texts and share patient records.
Net Medical Xpress recently unveiled a two-way WebRTC solution for telemedicine called RTC Conference Switch. Once installed on a doctor's website, a patient could click a button, see a doctor's availability information and initiate a videoconference from within the Web browser.
Security is non-negotiable in any medical application, so any WebRTC solution has to enable secure conferencing and record sharing to remain HIPAA and HITECH compliant. RTC Conference Switch, for example, routes communications through the Net Medical Xpress Safety Pilot, which is a series of encryptions, automations, permissions and auditing.
As more practitioners realize WebRTC's potential for telemedicine, new integrated solutions could take conferencing beyond just video calling and record sharing.
WebRTC applications integrating solutions like VIPAAR's VirtualAssist and LiveDraw, for example, could enable a doctor to see a specialist's hands pointing to specific items while they view an imaging scan together. The doctor could also see written annotations within the video feed that the specialist makes on the scan.
Telemedicine can cut healthcare costs, and WebRTC cuts the cost of deploying telemedicine. It's a winning combination that could simultaneously save both money and patients' lives.
Image via Shutterstock
Edited by
Rachel Ramsey
