Telecommunications providers that were once hesitant to enter the telemedicine market due to a limited reimbursement are shaking off their doubts and developing a more aggressive, confident approach to telemedicine, an IDC report concludes. Published in May, the IDC Health Insights report entitled: "Business Strategy: Monetizing Telemedicine--Telecommunications Provider Opportunities," is the second in a series of four that examines the market for telemedicine and telehealth services. The report described 2010 as a "tipping point" in telecom providers' go-to-market strategy and notes that several companies took the plunge and announced new healthcare initiatives dedicated to providing telehealth services. For example, last year AT&T launched AT&T ForHealth, a collection of services dedicated to accelerating the delivery of wireless, networked, and cloud-based systems specifically for the healthcare industry.
The Massachusetts Regional Extension Center has signed up more than 2,500 primary care providers to assist them in becoming meaningful users of health IT, making it the leader of the nation's 62 centers in meeting its recruitment goal one year into the program. After enrolling physicians, the next milestone will be for the extension centers to help physicians go live with certified electronic health records with electronic prescribing and quality reporting capabilities, according to a May 25 announcement from the Office of the National Coordinator for Health IT. The health IT experience and skills of the extension center staff were crucial to reaching its goal so quickly, said Bethany Gilboard, director of health technologies for the Massachusetts eHealth Institute, which become the extension center in April 2010.
The X Prize Foundation announced a new $10 million contest to develop a portable device that can diagnose a wide range of diseases with the same accuracy as a panel of board-certified physicians. The details of the contest are still being worked out, but the goal is likely to be a device that can perform a number of diagnostic tests and combine these with artificial intelligence to determine whether a subject has a particular malady. Such a device could help those who lack access to traditional medical services—and streamline access to specialty care in traditional medical treatment. "Imagine a world where people get funneled to the right part of a complex health system at the right time," says Eileen Bartholomew, a senior director at the X Prize Foundation. Bartholomew is working on designing the exact parameters for the prize, which will be launched in 2012.
For many years, service members who were leaving the military have had to worry about whether their medical records would be properly transferred from one vast computer network in the Defense Department to another in the Department of Veterans Affairs. Now, the two departments have agreed to develop a joint computerized system for health care records that could provide a single source of data on a veteran's health from enlistment through death, officials said. The move is one of several that suggest the two departments are moving closer to unifying parts of their sprawling health care systems, which handle more than 15 million active-duty troops, retirees, veterans and their families. The agreement comes after a February report by the Government Accountability Office found that the departments were lagging in developing a shared system for electronic records. That report said both departments had spent billions of dollars upgrading their data systems in ways that did not increase coordination between their systems, and it recommended that they improve their "joint strategic planning."
As the drive to design a workable accountable care organization model gets under way, the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services announced several Affordable Care Act initiatives that require a robust health IT infrastructure to support doctors, hospitals, and other healthcare providers in improving care with Medicare through ACOs. The new ACO models could save Medicare up to $430 million, CMS said. Among the initiatives introduced is the Pioneer ACO Model, an ACO model that will be available to providers this summer and is designed for advanced organizations ready to participate in shared savings. The Center for Medicare and Medicaid Innovation will support this model, CMS said. The Innovation Center released a request for applications last week for the Pioneer ACO Model, which provides a faster path for mature ACOs that have already begun coordinating care for patients and are ready to move forward.
A teaching method that allows novice med students to instantly move with the same dexterity as the world's most seasoned surgeons sounds like the kind of science fiction quackery that'd get patients killed. But it's real. Acting as a virtual master surgeon, an advanced software program called HoST (Hands on surgical training) can use a robotic surgical simulator to physically guide the hands of novice surgeons in the exact same movements utilized by experienced surgeons to perform extremely complex operations. The RoSS (Robotic Surgical Simulator) simulates the operations of the only robotic surgical system in existence, the da Vinci, and the new HoST software takes it to the next level by using augmented reality based real-time operative scenarios and a form of haptic feedback to help the trainee "feel" the movements made by an experienced surgeon.