Telemedicine and mHealth have been cited as the best ways to manage remote or chronically ill patients, figure out if you’re sleeping enough or even the most popular, measuring weight loss and exercise goals. Telemedicine and mHealth are seen as the great white way to improving the health of the nation and reducing the costs of care.
We’re talking big bucks here. A 2011 study by Anna Sommers and Peter Cunningham released by the National Institute for Health Care Reform found that hospital readmissions within a month of discharge have cost over $16 billion each year, as Steff Deschenes reported.
Yet, telemedicine can be used to reduce readmissions and other adverse events at a cost that is less than the cost of the problems themselves.
A monitoring program that a Pennsylvania-based health provider recently adopted is estimated to have reduced hospital readmissions by 44 percent, according to mHIMSS, a not-for-profit organization focused on providing data about the use of health information technology and management systems.
Telepyschiatry is even being offered in prisons to provide mental health care for inmates while they remain incarcerated.
"Collectively, investments in telemedicine and mHealth have great potential to reduce healthcare system costs," said Adam C. Powell, president of Payer+Provider Syndicate, a consulting firm that uses techniques from health services research to bring about change in the health insurance and hospital industries, according to Deschenes.
Powell said use of remote analysis services, like telepathology and teleradiology can enable “highly-trained professionals to work as a pooled resource,” allowing low-volume providers to have 24/7 coverage at a lower cost. In smaller facilities, there may not be sufficient volume to keep a pathologist or radiologist fully occupied. “Telemedicine enables fractional employment,” Deschenes noted.
Remote monitoring technologies are now enabling patients to be monitored just about anywhere, anytime data can be transmitted to care providers, freeing them from hospital beds where they would normally have been consigned. “Moving some forms of observation to an outpatient basis substantially reduces the costs borne by the healthcare system,” according to Deschenes.
The use of mHealth monitoring technologies reduces the cost of complications due to chronic disease, alerting doctors to signs that intervention may be needed for a patient not currently hospitalized, such as a dip in heart rate or high glucose levels, or even weight gains indicating fluid retention, a sign of congestive heart failure.
What’s being called “at home triage services,” supplemented by televisits with nurses and primary care physicians can reduce the unnecessary (and expensive) use of emergency room visits.
And by offering telemedicine appointments, providers can reduce the amount of their unused capacity that goes to waste, Powell told Deschenes. “Many services allow providers to start or stop accepting patients based upon their current availability. As this capacity would otherwise not produce any revenue, providers are able to provide remote patient visits at a rate that is lower than the one they normally offer. This in turn reduces system costs by enabling patients to receive care at a lower price point,” Deschenes revealed.
Edited by
Rachel Ramsey
