Featured Story: Are the stars aligning for telemedicine's succcess?

Monday, 20 July 2009 10:39

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The current health care crisis has some experts saying that telemedicine's time has finally come.

While technology companies have been touting the use of virtual technology to allow doctors to remotely examine and monitor patients for decades, up until recently the business case for deploying these expensive systems was hard to justify. But now as lawmakers in Washington, D.C. look for ways to fix the broken health care system, technologies, such as high-definition video conferencing and telepresence, are getting a second look.

Last week, technology giant Cisco Systems and a major U.S. insurer UnitedHealth Group announced a partnership in which UnitedHealth will use a Cisco product called HealthPresence to develop a national program to allow doctors to treat patients remotely. The program will initially focus on providing people in remote and under-served areas with health care. But Cisco and UnitedHealth representatives say eventually the program could be expanded throughout the country.

Part of the reason that telemedicine hasn't taken off in a big way in the past has been cost. While technologies, such as telepresence may eventually reduce the cost of providing health care services, initially they are expensive to deploy. For example, Cisco's high-end telepresence conferencing system that is sold to large companies to replicate a boardroom costs upward of $300,000.

Read more in the July 20, 2009 EDN

"Are the stars aligning for telemedicine's succcess? "

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