Marriage Announcement! TeleHealth & TeleCom

There is a lot to be said for great marriages. You’ve got to know your spouse well, have complementary personalities and most important – learn how to grow together!

Thus we announce the joining of TeleHeatlh and TeleCom. (They were actually secretly married long ago.) Now they are producing benefits and offspring in terms of their wireless and broadband activities.

Benefits in terms of devices and data networks include the following. Solutions for these benefits are available today!

• Early and immediate intervention of acute attacks prevents longer term problems from becoming more serious and possible fatal. This also helps society from financing costly emergency room visits and other intensive treatments.

• The ability to track medical information on a broader basis. Most Remote Patient Monitoring systems will automatically populate EMR and PHR files.

• Patient available apps (for phone or computer) to help with fitness routines and wellness principles

• Advances the shift from disease centric management to a prevention centric model. The beginning of the path to "personalized medical care."

• Deliver control to consumers (which they have expressed they desire) for:
Real time feedback and actionable information
Visualization rather than pure text discussions

• Distributed real time medicine. (Think of large call centers equipped with two way monitors, web cameras, etc, Staffed with medical professionals, including specialists)

• Patient mobility – patients can travel and still receive some level of care by their primary physician. This provides the ubiquity for "healthcare everywhere."

While the press has been hot and heavy on ObamaCare lately, they have been active in this area as well. BusinessWeek recently had an article on the ‘Digital Hospital’. TIME magazine published ‘The Science of Staying Healthy’.
The public is aging and the traditional model of care needs to be more efficient and serve the patient’s desires.

How do we get there?

We, at RSI, believe the growth TeleHealth is an evolutionary process. Today practitioners are hesitant, patients still want to visit with their physician for routine matters, and payors must be able to administer rational payments for the services provided.

However, the incentive is to allow medical professionals to apply their skills and be rewarded for efficiency. The end result may be lower hospitalizations per patient per year.

The forecast for worldwide TeleHealth subscribers is 55 million by 2016, with an annual growth rate of 72%. According to ABI Research, the portable device market is slated to have 15 million devices in operation by 2012, which is double the amount in use today.

Where do we go from here?

• Enable a complete EHR from pre-service to post-service
• Ensure that the EHR is visible to all practitioners,
• Secure the patient data while in transit and at rest,,
• Embed TeleHealth into the normal workflow of medical professionals,
• Provide training for both practitioners and patients, and
• Get the payors on board with TeleHealth as an efficiency tool:
o Pay the medical professionals a reasonable value for their efforts
o Reduce the patients’ premiums or other costs
o Market the availability of these services

Going forward, the integration of remote devices, networks and applications in healthcare will help people live dramatically better lives, provide the caregiver community with easier tools to manage work flow, and inject far greater efficiencies to drive healthcare costs down.

I am looking forward to the wedding reception!

Timing for TeleHealth couldn't be better

TeleHealth has great benefit to patients, medical professionals, payors and hospital systems. In every segment costs are reduced and service levels increase – through convenience if nothing else. This is not to say that, when necessary, TeleHealth is a replacement vehicle for critical care or a physician’s in-person assessment of a situation.

Emerging wireless technologies are transforming healthcare. Remote Patient Monitoring (RPM) devices with embedded cellular and Wi-Fi technology provide the final critical link in the TeleHealth eco-system. This new value chain is connecting remote wireless intelligent devices through a broadband network accessing clinical, analytical and administrative medical applications. Adding to this is a standards organization to ensure interoperability and therefore creating true convergence in an explosive industry.

In addition, the continued evolution of fixed broadband networks provides a robust foundation for connecting the patient to the caregiver organization. Today’s broadband and wireless networks:

• Are more powerful in transmission and throughput capacity,
• Have much better coverage (footprint) than in prior years,
• Have the ability to encrypt transmissions for security, and
• Are widely connected to hospital systems, doctors’ offices, pharmacies, convenient care, at home, assisted living and skilled nursing centers.

This enables caregivers to transmit data and to pull electronic medical records much more efficiently. Immediate access to these systems facilitates a level of care giving on a remote basis that was not possible even a few years ago. Clearly such access to Patient Medical Information (PMI) must be protected within the HIPAA and other security rules.

How can we benefit from all of this? One answer is more efficient care giving using TeleHealth. A recent study from the Kaiser Family Foundation points out that the top 5% of chronically ill patients consume 50% of the healthcare spend in the US. The healthiest 50% of the population consume only 3.4% of the healthcare spend.

Again, while we are not advocating TeleHealth as the only method to treat ill people, we do think there are inherent efficiencies available to the current system. We are welcome any comments.

Tips for Outsourced Sales and Marketing

We all look for ways to increase sustainable revenue. Many firms (including ours, Realistic Solutions) offer outsourced sales and marketing services. But, if the results haven’t proved in – what did you spend your highly allocated funds on?

Engaging a firm to provide outsourced sales and marketing is similar to hire the internal staff to complete the effort. You have to perform your diligence and determine for yourself what they bring to the table.

Desired areas of expertise include –

• what are the extent of their relationships – can they reach out to industry and quickly find answers that you cannot
  
  
    
• do they customize a workable plan for you 
  
  
    
• their experience level – are they able to perform within different industries with mutilple hurdles to overcome 
  
  
• last - do they have a successful track record – either within or outside of your industry

The last point indicates the ability of the firm to adapt to new and creative ways to solve problems. Your problems typically may be: an unknown brand, pricing issues vis-à-vis competitors, re-launching after a set-back, etc

To avoid sounding too much like a text book on the subject, let’s switch gears. There are intangibles to cover as well:

• First – do you like the firm you are about to outsource to?
  
  Let’s look at principals’ personalities. This question is so simple, but the answer is more complex. Do you like them and, furthermore, believe them?
  
  If not walk away and have a nice lunch. You just saved your company a lot of heartache and cash.
• Second – will the team go out and actually sell your product.
  
  Will they meet with prospects? Do they enjoy that? It is not to say that is the outsourcers 100% role, but it is important. We all can point to successful firms whose executives spend some part of each year touching customers. They do it because it works to build a better business.
  
  Many consultants prefer the ‘conductor’ role. But guess what – if you are not in the action, you really don’t have the first hand experience to regroup and attack again.
• Third – do the principals have an extensive working relationship? This is critical for two reasons. They have to be able to interact with each other well so they can solve your issue.
  
  Second if one gets hit by a bus – how do the others have a clue about the process she/he was undertaking? It is important to have legacy relationships.

The final thought in this thought track is that you are outsourcing sales and marketing efforts to achieve faster results. Ideally it is less expensive than hiring your entire team as well. But even if it is breakeven from a cost perspective, the faster results should sway the decision to move ahead.

An early boss of mine used to quote “ the only thing better than more revenue is, more revenue faster.”

I still work by that slogan today.