Scroll Top

Healthcares Digital future: Telemedicine and remote monitoring

Every week, news stories are published about new technologies that have the potential to transform and reshape healthcare. But discriminating applications with real promise from hype, and knowing which products will stand the test of time to actually transform healthcare is difficult at best. Heathcare’s Digital Future: Telemedicine & Remote Monitoring

A few trends over the past several years offer a glimpse into what healthcare of the future might look like. The key to making that future a reality lies in leveraging existing and newly-obtained data to create new insights about how healthcare can be delivered, how pharma can develop new medications less expensively and faster than today, and how health systems and insurers can work together to reduce healthcare spending and improve patient outcomes. Overwhelmingly, that future includes digital health—the intersection of technology, data, and healthcare.

Telemedicine and remote patient monitoring are two of the technologies already playing a much bigger role in healthcare delivery. Where once only a few companies offered telemedicine as a way to connect specialists with patients in rural settings, more health systems and insurers are expanding telemedicine and video conferencing services.

One of the more widely publicized examples of this is the Cleveland Clinic’s partnership with American Well, which brings on-demand telemedicine visits with Cleveland Clinic providers to some CVS stores.

Insurance giant Aetna began to offer its members access to expanded services for behavioral health, dermatology, and caregiver services through the mobile app Teledoc in late 2017, adding to other uses of the service.

Just a few months ago, the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS) released the final Medicare Physician Fee Schedule for 2018. In this document, CMS finalized several billing codes associated with delivery of care via telemedicine for specific health indications like health risk assessments and chronic care management.

To read the whole article please click: Here