With telemedicine beginning to take over healthcare, it’s perfectly fitting for MedCity to have Julie Hall-Barrow speak at CONVERGE. She is Senior Director of Healthcare Innovation and Telemedicine for Children’s Medical Center Dallas, and in her current role in the Population Health Division of Children’s, Dr. Hall-Barrow is pioneering the use of telemedicine to reach medically underserved populations.
Hall-Barrow will be speaking on the second day of MedCity CONVERGE at 11:05 a.m. The third annual CONVERGE is July 15-16 in Philadelphia.
Payers, providers, medtech, pharma, digital health, startups and investors will all come together at CONVERGE to focus on healthcare’s greatest opportunities and challenges. Check out the agenda and register today.
To highlight the speakers before the conference, we asked them each a few questions.
What or who inspires your work in healthcare?
At the end of the day – knowing that I am helping our most vulnerable population – children – keeps me going. I have had some great mentors throughout my career but my most memorable are those clinicians who championed doing the right things for the right reasons. So many times regulations and payments have not kept pace with technology and programming – but those mavericks who allowed me to continue to develop access points for those in need – resonate with me today!
What do you think is the most important change happening in healthcare today?
A Deep-dive Into Specialty Pharma
A specialty drug is a class of prescription medications used to treat complex, chronic or rare medical conditions. Although this classification was originally intended to define the treatment of rare, also termed “orphan” diseases, affecting fewer than 200,000 people in the US, more recently, specialty drugs have emerged as the cornerstone of treatment for chronic and complex diseases such as cancer, autoimmune conditions, diabetes, hepatitis C, and HIV/AIDS.
For me it is the depth of data and analytics that are one of the most important change agents in telemedicine. So many programs began with grant funds and physician interest. Today, telemedicine is a strategic focus on how to improve outcomes, decrease re-hospitalizations, avoid costly access points and most importantly get the right care at the right place at the right time.
Telemedicine has been around for a long time. What is finally bringing it to the mainstream?
Several factors are moving the dial on telemedicine. The first is the flexibility that is now available in the technology. We no longer have many of the barriers that surrounded infrastructure and endpoints. Your smartphone is now an endpoint versus a 100-pound TV unit that needed to be connected to a network via an expensive T1 line.
Second, is the great need to provide rapid response to a patient with a finite number of specialists. Quality metrics and the new payment structures are forcing healthcare administrators to find unique ways to bundle care and to be more efficient. Telehealth (medicine and including health education/disease management) lends itself to making that possible.
How long until the term “telemedicine” merges into the general practice of medicine and loses its special designation?
We debate that question a lot. A good friend and colleague Neil Herendeen, MD, from NY has been trying to do this for years now. I do think that we are making small strides in this direction – as technology is just a tool in the medicine bag if you will. Integrating monitors, video, text to the patient care experience is exploding and, like EMRs, it will be a part of our practice, not a separate practice.
You can find Julie on LinkedIn, Facebook, and Twitter (@juliehallbarrow)
