The Capitol Hill briefing “Telehealth and Telemedicine: Adopting New Tools of the Trade” sponsored by the Alliance for Health Reform and Wellpoint discussed how effectively telehealth and telemedicine is advancing to meet healthcare needs. Ed Howard of the Alliance said, “Efforts to promote telehealth and telemedicine could help the millions of people currently projected to obtain health insurance coverage.
Neal Neuberger, Executive Director for the HIMSS Institute for eHealth Policy, gave an overview of major policy issues and the numerous players in the field. Some of the issues relate to understanding what drives cost effectiveness, how to deal with chronic care and disease management issues, and how to effectively enable capital investment and sustainability to take place. It is also important to understand the Federal government’s investment picture in agencies such as DOD, VHA, IHS, and HHS.
Neuberger stressed that agencies and industry have to be concerned with updating standards to achieve quality and safety, how to deal with infrastructure in terms of broadband access and interoperability, and really look at all the human dimension issues involved in establishing telehealth and telemedicine programs.
Looking at telehealth and telemedicine from the federal perspective, Sherilyn Pruitt, Director of the HRSA Office for the Advancement of Telehealth discussed several of their effective grant programs:
- Licensure Portability Grants—provides support for state professional licensing boards to reduce barriers to licensing issues
- Telehealth Network Grants—to demonstrate how telehealth network technologies can be used to help expand access coordinate and improve the quality of health services. This year, the emphasis was on improving health outcomes
- Flex Rural Veterans Grant Program—now partnering with the VA Office of Rural Health to increase the delivery of quality mental health and other healthcare services to all rural veterans, their families, and other rural residents. New awards were announced September 2013 with three grantees funded for three years at $300,000 each year utilizing telehealth technologies
- Telehealth Resource Centers Grant Program provides experts on the deployment of telehealth technology in 12 regional and two national resource centers
Karen S. Rheuban M.D., Director of the University of Virginia’s Center for Telehealth pointed out how successfully the UVA program uses advanced technology and broadband to provide videoconferencing for patient care, store and forward applications, and remote patient monitoring.
Today, the university telehealth center participates in a Telemedicine Partner Network with 108 sites covering most of Southwest Virginia to assist hospitals, health systems, rural clinics, FQHCs, state departments of health and corrections, schools, nursing facilities, and homes. So far the program has provided 33,000 patient encounters.
Dr. Rheuban reports that several telemedicine programs have been highly successful. These include the high risk obstetrics telemedicine program that has reduced preterm delivery by 25 percent, the telestroke program has increased the use of the clot-busting drug TPA from zero percent to 17 percent when treating stroke patients, and remote monitoring in the home has proven to be a very effective tool resulting in reduced hospital stays and readmissions.
From the health plan point of view, John Jesser, Senior Vice President at WellPoint, told the group that WellPoint’s health plan members located in 45 states and D.C are able to consult with doctors using telemedicine technologies. WellPoint is working with American Well a telehealth company to provide the “Live Health Online” system to communicate with patients via live consultations using any device including mobile. Ninety percent of the people using “LiveHealth Online” found that it saved time and 85 percent found that their medical issue was taken care of in less than ten minutes.
Jesser reports that since employers now realize savings approaching a $45 cost of care offset per online care visit. Savings depend on the number and type of visits and distances saved in seeking care. In talking to employees about their experience with the system, over 90 percent are satisfied with the service and will recommend the service to friends, family, and co-workers.
For more information, go to www.allhealth.org or email info@allhealth.org.