Lower Cost, Higher Quality Health Care Is Right at Our Fingertips
July 27, 2018
News Article
Telemedicine is making better care, quicker care and life-saving care available to more patients every day.
Thanks to technological breakthroughs, we don’t need to travel to a doctor’s office or a hospital for every medical need. We can get much of our care right in our own home.
“It used to be that you had to have very expensive equipment and you had to have T-1 lines to allow for video connections,” says Lauren Faison, Director of Telehealth at Tallahassee Memorial HealthCare (TMH), a non-profit community hospital in Florida. “But now with any kind of Wi-Fi signal and a secure software system and a camera, you can provide health care virtually.”
The biggest obstacles? Government. Insurance companies. Employers. They pay the bills. Not only have they been slow to take advantage of telemedicine, they are refusing to pay for most of it—even today. As I explained in a previous post, there are two things standing in the way: a payment system that is decades out of date and attitudes of some doctors whose mindset hasn’t changed since the Middle Ages.
Potential Benefits. The long reach of telemedical technology is being stretched every day:
