Increasingly, it's beginning to look like health insurers are ready to accept to the online medicine trend. Recently, Aetna and Cigna agreed to reimburse doctors for online visits, and other insurers are expected to follow their lead.
Railways to expand telemedicine network in India
This sketchy report talks about the India Railways and their expansion of their support from the current 9 facilities to 23.
African nations agree to US$1 billion Indian satellite project
This is India's plan to invest $1 billion "in the Pan-African e-Network satellite project, a joint initiative with the Africa Union aimed at developing the region's information and communication technology (ICT) infrastructure."
Twenty-seven African nations have signed on so far to this project which will connect their countries by satellite and fiber-optic network.
The project will include installation of Very Small Aperture Technologies (VSATs) to carry VoIP (voice over Internet protocol) communication. The VSATs will be used for online education and telemedicine programs expected to extend ICT infrastructure to rural areas and other underserved communities. The telemedicine network will be used to share knowledge from Indian doctors with their African counterparts through an online training program.
FCC to Provide $400M for Rural Telemedicine Networks (Unfortunately, at the FCC Web site they don't have an HTML press release I can link to, but they provide a Word doc or Acrobat download.)
From the FCC press release:
To significantly increase access to acute, primary and preventive health care in rural America, the Federal Communications Commission today dedicated over $417 million for the construction of 69 statewide or regional broadband telehealth networks in 42 states and three U.S. territories under the Rural Health Care Pilot Program (RHCPP).
And,
The Commission’s RHCPP will support the connection of more than 6,000 public and non-profit health care providers nationwide to broadband telehealth networks. The health care facilities participating in the Pilot Program include: hospitals, clinics, universities and research centers, behavioral health sites, correctional facility clinics, and community health centers.
This press release from SUNY Plattsburgh, NY mentions the FCC initiative and that the Research Foundation of SUNY will be receiving a "$7.6 million grant to improve telemedicine services."
The consortium of non-profit rural and urban health care providers in Clinton, Essex and Franklin counties, named The Adirondack - Champlain Telemedicine Information Network, or ACTION, will receive a grant in the amount of $7,648,304 to build a robust fiber optic network connecting the medical centers, the hospitals, a community health center, two community colleges and SUNY Plattsburgh. The state of the art fiber optic network, dedicated to telehealth and telemedicine, will connect all health care providers in those counties to each other and to Internet2, the next generation of the global computer network.
$22 million will be going to the California Telehealth Network.
This another CNET video, this time showing the Intel Berkeley Lab's effort to produce antenna systems to support rural clinics with telemedicine projects, in this case in India. Pictured above are the antennas they are developing. Interesting enough, they use a proprietary "custom-designed Intel protocol" based on 802.11.
Tags: Intel, rural clinics, medical wireless, telemedicine
In the discussion forum at the Center for Connected Health, the question is raised by Jon Darsee as to whether the lack of widespread acceptance of telemedicine projects might be related to the opinion that these might not be addressing the need that patients have for personal contact with the healthcare professional.
In this past, these projects were viewed as important for their ability to monitor and collect data efficiently, and the allow consultation with experts who are not nearby.
But, this could be a good selling point to consider:
One potential answer is this. Patients crave intimacy in direct proportion to their inability to get it within the bricks and mortar of our traditional healthcare system. Telemedicine has done a remarkable job of extending that healthcare system into the home. But that may not be enough. Perhaps the answer is at the other end; not so much in creating convenience and timeliness of data collection or remote monitoring, but in using telemedicine as a tool to forge a stronger human connection, to create intimacy that may be absent or lacking from the lives of many sufferers of chronic diseases.
Tags: telemedicine
