Telehealth
The Center for Connected Health has received a research grant from the McKesson Foundation's Mobilizing for Health initiative to integrate a text-messaging program into an existing program at Massachusetts General Hospital to help diabetes patients better manage their condition.
It’s no secret telemedicine has had a profound impact on the industry, both nationally and globally. Organizations in big and small cities are seeing the benefits of employing such technology. Shahid Shah gives us the five ways telemedicine is boosting care in rural communities.
Mercy, the eighth largest Catholic healthcare system in the U.S., announced plans this week to build a virtual care center in Chesterfield, Mo., billed as "the first of its kind in the country."
A bill signed last week in California aims to greatly increase access to healthcare in rural areas by providing more telehealth services, through more providers, in more care settings.
The iPhone 4S will be available on October 14, and one expert says Apple's new release "certainly boosts its suitability for healthcare applications." But one team of UC Davis researchers didn't need an upgrade to transform their iPhones into medical-quality imaging and chemical detection devices.
It's hard to overstate the impact Steve Jobs, who died Wednesday at age 56, has had on technology for the past 30 years. In hardware, software, communications and design, Apple's contributions have been incalculable – not least in healthcare.
With the telehealth industry now in its second decade, the number of procedures for which payers will reimburse providers is still a very short list ¬– and it isn’t growing quickly.
Imagine your marching orders are to link networking and telepresence across a wide array of hardware platforms and software applications to enable telemedicine with both voice and visual capabilities as far forward as possible into the remotest battlefield regions in Iraq and Afghanistan.
Well, that’s only part of what LTC William Geesey and The U.S. Army’s Medical Communications for Combat Casualty Care (MC4) unit are doing. The pieces already include telesurgery and telebehavioral health services. Geesey spoke with Government Health IT Editor Tom Sullivan about what MC4 has accomplished to date, and what it is looking to achieve in the near future.
Alaska’s telehealth program is marching forward on the back of a device affectionately known as the “turtle.”
It’s not about the technology.
One would think, given the struggles of telemedicine programs to gain a foothold in the healthcare landscape, that advocates would point first to the tools and gadgets that help connect doctors and their patients in different locations.