While America—and indeed, much of the world—is beginning to “gray”, so to speak, this new development has spawned a major new opportunity in healthcare. That's leading to more than a few firms offering healthcare and related services looking to expand, and Aligned TeleHealth is proving to be no exception on this front. In fact, reports note that the company has landed a new source of private financing to fuel its expansion bid, and a couple new advisors as well have come on board.
Aligned TeleHealth already offered a fairly extensive menu of services, including complete telemedicine solutions for hospitals, emergency rooms and the like. But now, thanks to the new funding—coming from a set of investors like Controles Graficos CEO Hector Sulaiman and OSI Systems CEO and founder Deepak Chopra—the company can step up its range of options. Additionally, Sulaiman and Chopra have reportedly signed on as advisors to Aligned TeleHealth, opening up some further new possibilities from there.
As for just what Aligned TeleHealth has in mind for both newfound investment and advisors, the company's CEO, Nitin Nanda, offered up some comment on just that point, saying “We are entering a pivotal stage with respect to gaining significant traction in urban and rural markets by serving an increase in patient visits to acute and critical care hospitals, especially emergency rooms, following the Affordable Care Act. In an era of healthcare reform, our company is focused on reducing wait times for specialty consults in emergency rooms, as well as improving throughput. Facilities are searching for these solutions to help reduce costs and provide patients with the highest quality of care, and Aligned TeleHealth is addressing these needs with the delivery of physician consultations through telemedicine and hospitalist services. At the same time, Aligned TeleHealth’s solutions appeal to physicians who increasingly face burdensome workloads by providing a highly flexible and effective patient care delivery system through telemedicine technologies.”
Rural telemedicine is indeed fast becoming a major new offering for a lot of companies; rural markets represent a chronically underserved market that's ripe to be tapped. There's very little competition out that way as yet, and while there can be issues of infrastructure to overcome—unless in an actual town, rural online connectivity can be a bit lacking if even available in the first place—the market is so open that finding a way in all but ensures that most of a somewhat small pie will be on hand to take. Telemedicine also has terrific applications beyond the rural market; the underserved markets of developing nations like much of Africa and parts of Asia can see value in this too, and even urban centers can take advantage of telemedicine. After all, not every major city has every major specialty of physician, so being able to trade a few back and forth as needed on superior urban connectivity should be a comparatively easy task.
Still, regardless of the use, Aligned TeleHealth now has the resources and the expertise to branch out both in terms of as yet untapped markets and as yet unrealized service offerings. There's a lot of room for Aligned TeleHealth to grow, and though only time will tell in just which fashion that growth takes place, the fact that the growth occurs at all will prove noteworthy enough.
Edited by
Maurice Nagle
