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Telemedicine Making Waves in Primary Urban Health Care Centers

Probable stance

Picture a single mom holding down a full-time job, pegged at an hourly rate, and also encumbered with the care of her two children—none older than five years. Say one of them falls ill, unexpectedly, from an asthmatic attack, flu or an eye infection. Her options seem limited to making a dash for the ER, after hours where she has access to medicine for her child or forfeiting her wages to consult a doctor. But here is the thing; telemedicine is an option. Unfortunately, it is uncharacteristic to get cover for this from significant bodies like Medicaid and Medicare or private payers. Subsequently, this translates to her spending approximately $40-55, if she wants to save time.

Alternative available

Telemedicine has been administered, in times gone by, through urban specialists in the advent to extend services into the rural areas. Keep in mind the inadequate supply of primary care doctors, nationwide, especially in the case of those who specialize and subspecialized. Consider getting a booking to see a doctor is not easy, it can take the duration of six months. And, this is not limited to the rural areas but typical of the urban areas as well. Then again other inconveniences imposed on urban patients are no access to transport, language barriers, and medicinal illiteracy. For these reasons, telemedicine seems a feasible option.

3 Factors hindering Telemedicine

Meanwhile, administration of telemedicine is hindered by:

Licensing: Telemedicine administered by medical practitioners is not readily available if they cannot practice freely state to state. Nonetheless, the Federation of State Medical Boards is actively involved in trying to make this a reality.

Equity: Private payers do not support the purchase of telemedicine in some states and their participation in rural areas is even less. On the other hand, parity laws work to facilitate the availability of telemedicine, more so in the urban areas.

Network: Poor communication network such as access to the internet is common to both the rural and urban areas. Improved cellular and broad facilities can reduce the frustration of patients in their access to telemedicine.

Stated a little differently, telemedicine is a revolutionary tool. Although looking at it from a theoretical point, it looks intricate, challenging and perhaps impractical. These are just a few things that can make telemedicine more effectual, flexible licensing, equity through parity laws, and improved network communication. Results include a healthier population, efficient distribution of medicine and better healthcare.

People who live in certain areas throughout the world have always struggled with getting the medical care and medical attention that they need. Even people who live in cities usually try to make sure that they live relatively close to the hospitals in their cities. Just getting to appointments on a regular basis can be frustrating for people who live in an inconvenient location for an extended period of time.

People who live in places like Alaska’s Denali Wilderness will have to drive miles over country roads in order to get to their doctors. They’re going to have to deal with all of the fluctuations of Alaskan weather in the process, and they’re going to need to make trips like this even during some of the worst moments of their lives. They’re also going to be painfully limited in terms of their options. In some cases, the patients in question might not even bond with their doctors, which is going to leave them at a greater disadvantage. Telemedicine is in the process of changing all of that forever.

It has been demonstrated through research today that tele-behavioral medicine is as effective as approaches to medicine that involve face-to-face communication. Naturally, tele-behavioral medicine is significantly more convenient that traditional methods ever could be, since people don’t even have to leave their homes in order to get the medical attention that they need. Today, telemedicine is becoming increasingly accepted, since even the people who were initially skeptical of the practice are starting to change their minds at last.

This new situation is also significantly more favorable for the doctors themselves, even though they have always had the advantage. Doctors couldn’t just decide to live in rural Alaska if that was what they wanted, since they had to live in a location that was convenient enough for their patients. Today, doctors are now going to get the opportunity to live wherever they want without having to worry about whether or not choosing a particular residence is a sound business decision. Telemedicine is in the process of setting both doctors and patients free forever.

Telemedicine market is expected to be worth over $34 billion globally by the end of 2020, with the United States, accounting for more than 40% of the global market, according to the new market research report published by Mordor Intelligence. However, such predictions did not account for the large telehealth market expected in the next five years.

There are currently over 200 telemedicine networks, with close to 4000 service sites in the united states, according to the American Telemedicine Association. Approximately two million Americans are using a remote cardiac monitor, and over five million do remote consultations, using telemedicine. More than half of the United State’s hospitals now use some form of telemedicine, while millions of patients across the world use telemedicine to monitor their vital symptoms.

Why Telemedicine is on the Rise

The key driving for telemedicine market is the rising cost of health care, increasing aged population, lack of appropriate infrastructure in hospitals to contain a large number of patients and rising prevalence of chronic diseases. The telemedicine is the solution that we can apply for various health care sectors to help meet the demand. Addressing rural healthcare issues, bringing on site healthcare to schools, or monitoring the in-home health of the elderly, it surely eliminates the barrier of the traditional health care across the globe.

Telemedicine Changing the Healthcare Sector

Currently, the healthcare sector is in the midst of health professional shortage in various parts of the world. This is because of the ageing and growing population, the increased incidents of chronic diseases and lack of appropriate infrastructure in most private practices, universities, clinics and hospitals, making it difficult for patients to access quality health care services. Fortunately, telemedicine is the right solution that can be used across health sectors to control these barriers. It enables specialists and primary care providers to monitor patients remotely, offering the best solution for their problems.

Ultimately, telemedicine is an exponentially growing medical niche with no signs of slowing down. It improves overall health quality for patients in need!

The need for telemedicine in the urban setting is greater than ever. The United States in particular has too few primary care physicians to meet the needs of the population and, more people are faced with a lack of time, transportation, or resources to spend a day at the doctor’s office. With the use of telemedicine, more of the people that need medical care can access it.

Consider the Lack of Providers

Some surveys have found that nearly 80 percent of adults visit emergency rooms because they do not have another provider to turn to and 48 percent go because their doctor is not available. This lack of access to doctors limits a person’s ability to get care. But it is not the only reason that telemedicine can change the overall well being of patients.

How Telemedicine Changes Urban Care

With the use of telemedicine, it becomes possible to reach a larger group of people in a more practical way. The same doctor can treat numerous patients in a far more streamlined manner without having to have patients come in. Imagine, for example, a single mother who has a child that has an ear infection. She is forced to miss work, and therefore pay, to visit a doctor’s office when she already likely knows that the child is ill, knows what the child needs, and doesn’t need an extensive testing.

Nevertheless, there are many struggles to establishing telemedicine in today’s urban setting. It may not meet the requirements, for example, of Medicare or Medicaid. In some cases, there is the need for physicians to have licensing updates to provide further coverage beyond traditional state borders. And, communication infrastructure needs to be updated to ensure a lack of resources does not limit Internet connectivity for these patients.

However, when proper structures are in place, individuals can thrive using telemedicine over other types of treatment options ultimately saving government-sponsored health programs money and improving overall quality of life for those in need.

Technology that can supposedly monitor someone’s heart rate is nothing new. People in the health and fitness community have been using it for decades now. However, many of these heart rate monitors have been notoriously unreliable. Advances in telemedicine may now be giving people heart rate monitoring equipment that will give them much more accurate results.

The AliveCor Mobile Heart Monitoring Using Medical-grade Electrocardiogram (ECG) Kardia Band for Apple Watch may change telemedicine forever. This EKG band distinguishes itself by actually being medical grade, so it’s capable of giving people results that are reliable. The associated Apple Watch application interprets the data that the sensors in the device receive.

Using the Apple Watch application, people can send their doctors EKG readings and accompanying voice memos, so their doctors can get a sense of the functioning of their patients’ hearts throughout the day. In conjunction with other health monitoring applications, people can more or less keep track of their well-being by the minute with a device like the AliveCor Mobile Heart Monitoring Using Medical-grade Electrocardiogram (ECG) Kardia Band for Apple Watch.

This product is aimed at people who have heart conditions or people who are at risk for heart conditions. Even a few seconds can matter when it comes to heart conditions, and doctors that are receiving information about the state of someone’s heart by the second are going to be much better equipped to deal with the situation. However, given that this is technically a mainstream product, almost anyone who was actually interested in health monitoring would be able to benefit from a device like this one.

Devices like this are making it easier and easier for doctors to operate remotely. Patients don’t actually have to go in for tests that will assess their heart health if they have access to devices like this. They can give doctors a sense of their health all the time, and not just during their annual physicals or during routine tests.

In the past, telemedicine programs in the USA were mainly located only in rural areas that lack medical facilities or clinics. Over the last several years, that trend has slowly begun to change, now, here in the US and Worldwide, the use of telemedicine is expected to grow by more than 10 times from 2013 to 2018. Telemedicine program apps like Figure1 are dramatically changing how people are treated in the most under resourced parts of the world. Figure1 is a Telemedicine apps that helps doctors treat people in remote locations by employing technology. Figure1, which is informally known as the Instagram for doctors, became a go-to option for health workers in under served areas. Figure1 boasts over 50 percent 1 million users, including doctors, nurses, along side some other medical professionals.

Dr. Rogy Masri is a practicing doctor in a settlement in North Lebanon. His medical team treats Syrian refugees primarily, those who have flooded into Lebanon region together with some other neighboring countries to escape escalating violence. His job for the faint of heart, regularly medications are in scarce supply, electricity cuts out on a regular basis, and people are susceptible to a host of horrible diseases including lice and rat bites to sexually transmitted infections. Masri, who is a Doctors Without Borders volunteer, must make do with limited medical equipment and tools. When a patient walks in with a common ailment, his team could often send them away with treatment, but unfortunately that’s not always the case.

In an recent Fast Company interview Masri explained that he examined a refugee that walk to the clinic having an extremely Red leather legion the size of a quarter on his arm. This patient did not respond to normal course of antibiotics. Masri, who isn’t a Dermatologist but trade and it has very little experience with exotic skin illnesses, he was stumped. He took out his smartphone and snapped a photo to record and share the legion, he submitted to a software called Figure1. He noted in the photo that the patient was a 52 year old male Syrian refugees having an infection which was treated for a year.

The outcome biopsy were still pending. On that particularly day, Dimas Yusuf, an interior medication resident at St Paul’s Hospital in Vancouver, Canada, happened to come across the photo. He’d a little of free time between modifications, and I decided to play medical detective. For Masri, a smartphone became an essential tool for fieldwork. Although it needs a second opinion, programs like Figure1 and individuals produced by Doctors Without Borders connect him with medical professionals across the world on the real time basis. The disadvantage is that on-line sites and electricity aren’t always reliable.

Despite the possibilities, general usage of telemedicine stays low among physicians. Less than 1% of physicians accounted for 22 percent of telemedicine visits in 2014, according to MedPAC. Only two percent of people had participated in a telemedicine consult, and just 69,000 people used telemedicine in 2014. Among public and private entities, the Department of Veterans Affairs, which supports remote consults by both lowering or waiving copayments, records among the best rates of telehealth use. In the past decade 736,000 veterans used such options, mainly for primary-care consults, long term care management and transmission of imaging or alternate patient data.

Some commissioners were worried that raising Medicare payment for such options would increase cost significantly without noticeably improving quality of care. More study is needed to determine the value of telemedicine in primary care, some commissioners said, although they acknowledged that more extensive adoption may decrease hospital and ER admissions. Medicare handles a limited set of telemedicine options with a facility fee to rural sites and full fee schedule payment for people who reside in designated medical specialist deficit regions. Jon Christianson, Ph.D., vice-chairman of MedPAC, said some company insurance agencies bill a high co-payment for telemedicine to discourage its use.

Other commissioners expressed the opposite view, noting that investment in such technology could decrease less cost-effective solutions like hospital visits, ER visits and imaging costs. If telehealth checks some of the costs, the slow escalation in telemedicine can be good, said Craig Samitt, M.D., M.B.A. I think we are being overly conservative. We should be embracing the use of technology faster in the marketplace. Our payment system should not suppress progress.

Today, U.S. Senators Brian Schatz, Roger Wicker, Thad Cochran, Ben Cardin, John Thune, and Mark Warner launched the Producing Opportunities Now for Vital and Effectual Care Technologies for Wellness Act, bipartisan laws which will enlarge tele wellness suppliers through Medicare, improve care outcome, make it easier for people to join with their health care providers, and help conserve money for people and suppliers. Mississippi has for ages been on the leading edge of healthcare technology, Senator Roger Wicker said. This bill seeks to replicate the achievement that we have made in Mississippi using this technology for patients through the country.

Use of tele-health methods is critical for many South Dakotans residing in rural locations, said Senator John Thune. The LINK for Wellness Act will give people more versatility with their health care regardless of where they determine to live. Technology has huge potential to change the Medicare plan, said Senator Mark Warner. As Governor of Va, I saw in close propinquity how tele well-being increased efficiency, availability and outcomes in Medicaid. Moving forward, we’ve to look for more ways to use creation and give Medicare providers more resources forgiving care. This bipartisan bill provides a good beginning amount, creating on the enhancement we’ve already made in Va, and includes strong quality metrics to give us a better consciousness of what functions and what doesn’t as our healthcare system goes further into the twenty-first century.

Telehealth is the way to obtain health care services via telecoms technology, like live video interactions and asynchronous medical data transfers, like store-and-forward technologies., Remote patient observation refers to private medical data transmitted securely from someone in one place via electronic communications technology to a provider in another place for the goals of healthcare. The AMA is very happy to support laws that will hasten the adoption of healthcare delivery models that encourage organized and patient focused care, said Steven J. Stack, M.D., President of the American Medical Association. This bill would make sure patients and their physicians are able to use new technology that remove impediments to timely quality care. Significantly, the bill would maintain high standards whether a patient is seeing a physician in an office or via telemedicine. We anticipate working with a few other supporters to improve this legislation in Congress.

Telemedicine provides comfort, quality, cost economies and remote access. All these are good thoughts, ones we have heard before. There are, though, a number of other plan initiatives worth focus, if the Affordable Care Act is repealed or not. There is one easy thing Congress could do that would broaden access to top quality care, specifically for patients in rural locations, without costing tax-payers a dime. Telemedicine suppliers, which uses telecommunications to provide healthcare over spaces, have made fantastic strides in enhancing access to care for rural communities. Telemedicine enables fast access to specialists, as with stroke sufferers where time is of the essence.

Video interactions are likely to replace a substantial hunk of face-to face workplace visits. However the present system of state licensing stands in the way of inter-state practice. Physicians should maintain licenses in every state by which they treat patients. Congressional action to determine the positioning of tele-medicine solutions as the place of the doctor would allow doctors to rehearse with one license in several states. It’d allow telemedicine to reach its full potential. Beneath the present system, doctors with several licenses are challenged to comply with state special medical practice laws, as inconsequential to patient security as they might be.

Legal scholars make the case that Congressional actions to lessen impediments to interstate telemedicine could find support in the U.S. Constitutions Commerce Clause. The American Medical Association and the Federation of State Medical Boards claim that permitting a doctor licensed in one state to provide remote care in the others would strive state board sources, placing the people in danger. The irony is that, for many years, state medical tables have been criticized by consumer groups and the others for setting the people in danger. It’s not state boards, but measures of the individuals that protect consumers.

Physician supervision and the resultant consumer protection are the goods of measures by things responsible for doctor malpractice, including hospitals, provider teams, medical medical health insurance agencies setting up doctor panels or networks, and medi cal malpractice insurance companies. These things qualification and assess doctors on a regular basis, not only as they enter the career or when a grievance is filed. There’s no signs that telemedicine suppliers go past the array of solutions that securely can be supplied remotely. Studies of telemedicine uncover improved access, top quality and, in several cases, cost savings. Telemedicine suppliers face bonuses related to indebtedness which are comparable to those confronted by other suppliers. As brand name becomes progressively important in the inter-state tele-medicine marketplace, I’d expect telemedicine quality to rise above that of many neighborhood support providers. Telemedicine provides comfort, quality, cost economies and remote access.

Zipnosis is one of those names that, when you first hear it, you can hazard a guess about what they do based on it’s two root words. Only if you guessed speedy hypnosis would you be wrong. Zipnosis is actually a telemedicine startup delivering clinically appropriate diagnosis in the time it takes to hold a conversation. As in, for a zippy diagnosis, there’s Zipnosis.

Zipnosis’ white label virtual care platforms help private health systems launch their own virtual care service lines that they can then staff with their own clinicians. The startup’s ultimate goal is to help their clients maximize each clinician’s time while retaining clinical caliber outcomes. From the patient’s perspective, it would be like having a one-one-one talk with your family clinician, wherein they can gather all of the necessary information for a diagnosis and provide treatment options, including most types of prescriptions or references.

“Our platform is designed to enable health systems to expand access to immediate care using their own clinicians,” Jon Pearce, co-founder and CEO of Zipnosis, said in a statement. “With Zipnosis, health systems have an opportunity to care for more patients under their own brand name and without adding staff. Patients are happier to be ‘seen’ sooner without having to step foot outside their home or go to a waiting room.”

As Zipnosis further explains, they are making it possible for health systems to glide through each of the clinical, marketing, compliance and operations workflows securely online. The software lines up with the health system’s current digital record vault and patient portal, allowing them to treat existing pateint, or onboard new patients. Plus, Zipnosis can be customized and proprietary-branded, so it seamlessly connects to the health system’s brick-and-mortar practice.

During its Series A financing round, Zipnosis managed to raise an astounding $17 million toward speeding up product development. Zipnosis provides its current telemedicine offering to 17 health care systems, which include Fairview Health Services, University of Alabama-Birmingham, Group Health and John Muir Health.