Telemedicine Starts with the Doctor's Voice

You've heard of manufacturers adopting just-in-time-inventory strategies? Well, healthcare providers should adopt just-enough-technology strategies.

Keep that in mind before diving deep into telemedicine. The term telemedicine is one of the vaguest technology buzzwords in this business, and it covers a multitude of approaches, everything from picking up the telephone to creating a "virtual ICU."

Now that all user-facing technology is going mobile, the demands of wireless networking and the demand for every provider to have an "mHealth" strategy mean more infrastructure, more planning, and more cost when crafting a telemedicine strategy.

But as I was researching a forthcoming story on mHealth for HealthLeaders magazine, I found David Gordon, MD, a board-certified cardiologist in Philadelphia who practices part-time in California and does utilization reviews for hospitals.

Gordon is making a difference in the lives of patients he's never met in person, and all he needs to do his work is his training, his experience, a telephone, and a Web browser. His story is the just-enough-technology success story of telemedicine.