Health IT

A look back at #ATA2012 (Four observations)

The American Telemedicine Association’s annual conference in San Jose, California wrapped up on Tuesday evening […]

The American Telemedicine Association’s annual conference in San Jose, California wrapped up on Tuesday evening with a networking event in San Jose’s Tech Museum.

Conference attendance climbed, representative of the what attendees no doubt perceived as the inevitable rise of telemedicine (more on that below). Attendance soared 34 percent to 4,640 from 3,450 last year, according to ATA spokesman Ben Forstag.

Here’s a look back at #ATA2012 with four completely subjective observations.

Conventional wisdom on the state  of telemedicine: It doesn’t take an Occupy Wall Streeter or aspiring anarchist/bridge bomber to realize a capitalist society and economy is predicated on people doing things because they think they’ll get paid. So the thinking on telemedicine is this: Until doctors get paid for it, few of them are going to do it. So the only thing holding back telemedicine from an explosion in adoption is reimbursement by health insurers, according to prevailing wisdom.

Challenging conventional wisdom: Some conference-goers had slightly different and sometimes more nuanced takes on the  state of telemedicine, with some pointing a finger at the U.S. government. The government is always an easy and convenient target in part because it typically deserves a little blame. Of course, things could always be a little more efficient, a little less bureaucratic, blah, blah, blah. But in this case, the key phrase is “a little.”

You can fault U.S. lawmakers as a whole and on an individual basis for not realizing the value of telemedicine like their Australian counterparts admirable have, but the ultimate responsibility lies with the industry. (That is: Those companies that stand to make the most money from telemedicine.) They’re the ones who must make the compelling case for telemedicine. Convince lawmakers and, to a lesser extent, the public that telemedicine can bring cheaper and (sometimes) better care with improved access to the American public and you’ll get your reimbursement.

More insightful were comments by Dr. Mark Blatt, Intel’s director of healthcare industry solutions, who said that increasing the use of telemedicine is really about changing expectations. When both doctors and patients mentally picture a medical visit, that picture typically doesn’t involve a videoconference, phone call or email. Telemedicine represents a fundamental change to how doctors practice medicine and how patients experience healthcare. Begin changing those expectations and convincing patients and providers that remote care can be more efficient and just as effective as in-person care, and then telemedicine will really take off, Blatt said.

Why attendance was up: Even without widespread reimbursement, the telemedicine market is still fairly big and, if its promise is real, will almost certainly explode. Harry Kim, senior director of Hewlett-Packard’s healthcare group, valued the worldwide annual market for telemedicine at $10 billion with an impressive 20 percent compound annual growth rate.

But that brings up another problem: It’s challenging enough to define exactly what the telemedicine market is. Certainly a company like American Well that offers online videoconferencing between providers and patients is. But so is a company like Medtronic, which sells cardiovascular devices that wirelessly transmit health data to doctors.  So with such a wide variety of applications that can be labeled “telemedicine,” it’s probably a pretty safe bet that ATA conference attendance will continue to grow.

Why the off-topic keynotes? After Twitter co-founder Biz Stone’s HIMSS keynote had virtually nothing to do with health IT (to his credit Stone freely admitted that early in his talk), I can’t say I was surprised that Apple co-founder Steve Wozniak devoted about 99.5 percent of his chat with ATA president Bernard Harris Jr. to nontelemedicine topics.  It certainly makes sense that conference-goers would like a bit of a break from the routine and cross-disciplinary collaboration seems to be a popular topic these days, so why not?

And at least credit Woz with giving a special shout-out to one lucky telemedicine company: ClickCare, a New York company that’s developed an app that lets physicians collaborate on care with pictures and video on iPhones and iPads.

[Photo from flickr user eliazar]

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