What is the future of telehealth?

When we think of telehealth, we think, "Here’s a cool video-conferencing that generates convenience for patients. When you take a step back and realize what the significance of telehealth is, then it’s a very different kind of story. Telehealth changes the fundamental paradigm that existed for hundreds of years: If you are a patient and you’re sick, you need to go to where healthcare is to get care. With the introduction of telehealth, we have the ability to reverse that paradigm, and say, "No, if you’re sick, healthcare can come to you where you live, where you work, when you need it, where you need it, under your own terms. Suddenly the healthcare industry is using technology to reach its end consumers. Not unlike the impact of what online retail has done to the retail industry, where it's actually said, "The shops are going to where the buyers are." This is the same impact that you are going to see of this technology on the healthcare industry. It fundamentally changes the reach of that industry and how patients are engaging consumer services.

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In what ways?

There’s a variety of different applications for this. Many people think of telehealth as, "Here's a way to give patients in rural areas access to healthcare." That’s kind of the low-hanging fruit. The reality is much, much broader. There are patients who live in metropolitan areas who have trouble reaching healthcare because they're elderly or because they have chronic conditions, and they’re homebound. They can’t go to the physician office everyday in order to care for their fluctuating blood sugar levels. And you have oncology patients who are taking chemotherapy and are at home that don’t want to leave their houses. You have a lot of patients who have undergone surgery in the hospital. And because we need to kick them out of the hospital quickly because every day in the hospital is so expensive. they go home for their recovery period, and we know that for the first month of recovery a lot of bad things happen, and our ability to use technology to monitor them and follow up with them at home allows us to prevent readmissions, which is a huge chunk of money that the healthcare system spends – the payer, or the delivery system, whoever it is. There is a whole different world that deals with compliance. If I’m the patient and I’m told I have to adhere to a certain pharmaceutical regimen – and many patients are not compliant –my ability to see that patient on a regular basis in order to make sure that they do follow up on what they need to do increases compliance dramatically. We know that patients who are not compliant show up in emergency rooms.

Then there is the notion of healthcare reform with 34 million Americans who don’t have access to an already stretched-thin primary care physician. We are facing a meltdown. We have to find a better way of utilizing PCPs that we have and making them available through technology to allow fewer physicians to care for more patients. When you think about the dramatic impact of the ability through technology to take the healthcare system to where the patient is, you pretty much get an understanding of how dramatic telehealth is in this market.