We’ve barely recovered from HIMSS15 in mid-April, but MedCity News Editor Chris Seper and I have found our way to the West Coast for the American Telemedicine Association’s annual meeting, which officially opens Sunday in downtown Los Angeles.
Chris and I will each be moderating multiple panels over the course of the event, as well as hosting video interviews with vendors and other newsmakers from the MedCity News Media Pavilion in the exhibit hall at the L.A. Convention Center.
Believe it or not, this is the 20th annual conference and trade show the ATA has staged, which ought to be a sign that telemedicine and telehealth — let’s not squabble over definitions here — are mature disciplines. (Then again, EHRs have been around in one form or another since the 1960s, and some still believe the technology is experimental.)
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A lot has happened in telemedicine since the ATA last convened, some positive and some negative.
Notably, Texas regulators gave into the old-guard physician lobby last month by banning doctors from making diagnoses or prescribing drugs via telephone or the Internet for any patient they do not have a previously existing, face-to-face relationship with. You can bet that telemedicine proponents will be talking this week about how to prevent this type of restriction from spreading to other states.
At the federal level, the two U.S. senators from Mississippi, where more than half the population is rural, are pushing for legislation to broaden Medicare coverage for telehealth services. Yes, that’s right, the promise of telehealth for improving access to care has led two Republicans to support an expansion of Medicare.
On Friday, UnitedHealthcare announced that it was teaming up telehealth providers Doctor On Demand, NowClinic and American Well to offer virtual physician consultations to beneficiaries it serves at self-insured corporations.
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Still, less than 20 percent of healthcare professionals surveyed last fall said that they were getting paid for delivering telemedicine services, so the reimbursement issue lingers. Elsewhere in rural America, South Dakota-based Avera Health has had mixed results with the “eCare” program it runs in eight states.
Verizon Communications walked away from its Virtual Visits program, but denied giving up on telemedicine. But money continues to flow into the sector, including from the likes of Richard Branson.
The ATA itself launched an accreditation program for telehealth providers near the end of 2014, and reported receiving more than 200 applications in the first three months.
At the 2015 conference, we expect to hear Dr. Patrick Soon-Shiong, scheduled to keynote on Monday morning, provide some more clarity about what his NantHealth is actually doing with the $1 billion or so Soon-Shiong has committed to the effort. He has kept the company mostly out of the public eye since making a splash at HIMSS14.
On the show floor, we will have the usual plethora of product announcements. We already reported on the debut of iC LovedOnes, a telehealth communicator for seniors that was invented by a Spokane, Wash., teenager.
Last week brought the news that Teladoc filed a draft registration statement with the Securities and Exchange Commission, a preliminary step toward an initial public offering, and that IBM and Apple were teaming up on a monitoring service for elderly people in Japan.
Of course, our inboxes have been spilling over with requests for vendor meetings. We can’t fulfill them all, but we know that the following companies and organizations will be making announcements, of various newsworthiness, at ATA 2015: MDLive; HealthSpot (in partnership with Xerox), the Scripps Translational Science Institute and Anthem subsidiary CareMore; Honeywell Life Care Solutions (formerly Honeywell HomMed); German firm Emperra; Cisco spinoff Avizia; WoundMatrix; and Vitaphone e-Health Solutions.
Mercy Virtual, the telehealth arm of Chesterfield, Mo.-based health system Mercy, is giving a preview of what it calls the world’s first virtual care center, which will open later this year. And in another sign the industry is maturing, a new magazine called Telemedicine is launching with a party on Monday. Invitees have been told that they will have an opportunity to “pitch your own story.”