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More Telehealth Benefits Coming To Medicare Advantage Plans In 2020

April 06, 2019

More Telehealth Benefits Coming To Medicare Advantage Plans In 2020

Access to telehealth services for seniors got another boost Friday when the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services said it would allow private Medicare Advantage plans to offer additional access to virtual doctors in their basic benefit packages.

The so-called final rule will bring new benefits to seniors in 2020 as part of their Medicare Advantage plans. Such coverage is growing rapidly and expected to account for half of Medicare beneficiaries in the coming years, some analysts say.

The full Forbes article can be viewed at this link.  

Name: 
Anna

Chasing Value as AI Transforms Health Care

March 31, 2019

Chasing Value as AI Transforms Health Care

Business leaders no longer think about artificial intelligence in terms of future impact—they’re seeing the impact today. AI is appearing in all corners of business, transforming the way companies operate. Health care is no exception.

Health care players are using AI to address significant inefficiencies and open up powerful new opportunities. These include everything from the delivery of remote health care services to the early diagnosis of disease and the hunt for new life-saving medicines. Today, the technology is incorporated into heart monitors, smart glucose pumps, and other recently FDA-approved diagnostic devices. Biopharma companies are already using AI to improve the efficiency of R&D; one notable example is through identification of better drug targets.

The ongoing rapid development of AI will trigger a major shift in the value pools across health care. This has serious implications not only for the industry’s four major traditional sectors—biopharma, providers, payers, and medtech—but also for consumers and technology companies. Boston Consulting Group has conducted an in-depth analysis of the potential impact of AI on health care, identifying two prospective scenarios for how value will shift among stakeholders. Under one scenario, much of the value unlocked by AI is retained by players in the four health care sectors and technology companies—while the second scenario sees much of the value flowing directly to consumers.

The full Boston Consulting Group article can be downloaded below. 

Name: 
Anna

North Dakota doesn’t have enough psychiatrists. Telemedicine is helping to fix that

March 28, 2019

North Dakota doesn’t have enough psychiatrists. Telemedicine is helping to fix that

Until recently, when the North Dakota human services agency had an opening for a mental health provider, months might go by before a single application came in.

But that’s started to change as the state boosts telemedicine as an option for mental health care. The department has started allowing providers who serve patients through its health centers to live in some of the state’s bigger cities — or even move out of state — and deliver mental health care to rural areas through video calls. The University of North Dakota’s medical school has started training its psychiatry residents to treat rural patients by computer.

“Telepsychiatry really is integral to our ability to provide that equitable access to psychiatric services across the state, regardless of rural and urban environment,” said Dr. Laura Kroetsch, a psychiatrist who works as the field medical director of the human services department.

The full STAT article can be viewed at this link.  

Name: 
Anna

With the Silver Tsunami on its way, telehealth is ready for its moment

March 27, 2019

With the Silver Tsunami on its way, telehealth is ready for its moment

Whether it's after-hours coverage at skilled nursing facilities or connected tools for home health monitoring, remote care technology is reaching maturation just when it will be needed most.

Grant Chamberlain, managing director in the corporate finance healthcare practice at Ziegler, has long experience of telehealth-focused investments. He's advised major health systems (Baylor Health, Cedars-Sinai, Sharp) and vendors such as AirStrip, MDLive and Voalte.

He's also director at the ATA and serves on the board of the not-for-profit MAVEN Project, which helps deliver care to underserved populations with volunteer physicians affiliated with Harvard, Yale, Stanford, UCLA and others.

Chamberlain agrees that telehealth maturity, acceptance and adoption have been a long time coming – and he thinks we still have a way to go before its benefits are fully felt.

The full Healthcare IT News article can be viewed at this link.  

Name: 
Anna

Machines Treating Patients? It's Already Happening

March 22, 2019

Machines Treating Patients? It's Already Happening

Looking back, many experts agree that the spotty record of early applications of AI don’t necessarily signal the demise of machine learning in medicine. Instead, they highlight the need to be humble with any innovation, especially one that comes with too much hype. “IBM was too ambitious in my opinion,” says Dr. Steve Jiang, director of the medical AI and automation lab at UT Southwestern.

Today’s efforts in AI are somewhat less flashy, though still potentially revolutionary, and all seem to recognize one vital lesson: treating patients is both art and science. Rather than attempting to replace the physicians in medical practice, AI can, and should, say more experts, become a valuable tool in enhancing what doctors do.

The full Time article can be viewed at this link.  

Name: 
Anna

4 mistakes your patients should avoid with wearables

March 22, 2019

4 mistakes your patients should avoid with wearables

Evidence on the impact of wearable digital health-monitoring devices is still emerging, as clinicians and researchers work to find out what these gadgets can and cannot do. In the meantime, however, there is a growing idea about the potential medical missteps patients should be aware of when donning wearables. 

  1. Disengaging before the benefit can be realized
  2. Ignoring the body’s messages and relying solely on the device
  3. Getting fixated on the data, a recipe for high anxiety
  4. Interpreting the data without physician help

The full American Medical Association article can be viewed at this link.  

Name: 
Anna

Primary Care Clinician Adherence to Specialist Advice in Electronic Consultation

March 17, 2019

Primary Care Clinician Adherence to Specialist Advice in Electronic Consultation

Electronic consultation (eConsult) services can improve access to specialist advice. Little is known, however, about whether and how often primary care clinicians adhere to the advice they receive. We evaluated how primary care clinicians use recommendations conveyed by specialists via the Champlain BASE (Building Access to Specialists through eConsultation) eConsult service and how eConsult affects clinical management of patients in primary care.

This is a descriptive analysis based on a retrospective chart audit of 291 eConsults done between January 20, 2017 and August 31, 2017 at the Bruyère Family Health Team, located in Ottawa, Canada. Patients’ charts were reviewed until 6 months after specialist response for the following main outcomes: implementation of specialist advice by primary care clinicians, communication of the results to the patients, method, and time frame of communication.

Primary care clinicians adhered to specialist advice in 82% of cases. Adherence ranged from 62% to 93% across recommendation categories. Questions asked by primary care clinicians related to diagnosis (63%), management (27%), drug treatment (10%), and procedures (1%). Recommendations of the eConsult were communicated to patients in 79% of cases, most often by face-toface visit (38%), telephone call (32%), or use of the patient portal (9%). Communication occurred in a median of 5 days.

We found little evidence of barriers to implementing specialist advice with use of eConsult, which suggests recommendations given through service were actionable. With a high primary care clinician adherence to specialist recommendations and primary care clinician–to-patient communication, we conclude that eConsult delivers good-quality care and improves patient management.

The full article can be downloaded below.  

Name: 
Anna

Why hospitals shouldn’t use telepresence robots to deliver devastating news

March 11, 2019

Why hospitals shouldn’t use telepresence robots to deliver devastating news

A doctor speaking through a telepresence robot in California gave a dying patient and his family devastating medical news, raising questions about when the convenience of telemedicine should be skipped in favor of a face-to-face conversation.

The full article from The Verge can be viewed at this link.  

Name: 
Anna

MOBILE HEALTH (M-HEALTH) AND ELECTRONIC HEALTH (E-HEALTH) SERVICES: A STUDY IN COST-EFFECTIVENESS OF TELEMEDICINE, ELECTRONIC, AND MOBILE HEALTH SYSTEMS

March 10, 2019

MOBILE HEALTH (M-HEALTH) AND ELECTRONIC HEALTH (E-HEALTH) SERVICES: A STUDY IN COST-EFFECTIVENESS OF TELEMEDICINE, ELECTRONIC, AND MOBILE HEALTH SYSTEMS

A systematic review of cost-utility and cost-effectiveness research works of telemedicine, electronic health (ehealth), and mobile health (m-health) systems in the literature is presented. Academic databases and systems such as PubMed, Scopus, ISI Web of Science, and IEEE Xplore were searched, using different combinations of terms such as ‘‘cost-utility’’ OR ‘‘cost utility’’ AND ‘‘telemedicine,’’ ‘‘cost-effectiveness’’ OR ‘‘cost effectiveness’’ AND ‘‘mobile health,’’ etc. In the articles searched, there were no limitations in the publication date. The search identified 35 relevant works. Many of the articles were reviews of different studies. Seventy-nine percent concerned the cost effectiveness of telemedicine systems in different specialties such as teleophthalmology, telecardiology, teledermatology, etc. More articles were found between 2000 and 2017. Cost-utility studies were done only for telemedicine systems. There are few cost utility and cost-effectiveness studies for e-health and m-health systems in the literature. Some cost-effectiveness studies demonstrate that telemedicine can reduce the costs, but not all. Among the main limitations of the economic evaluations of telemedicine systems are the lack of randomized control trials, small sample sizes, and the absence of quality data and appropriate measures.

The full article can be downloaded below.  

Name: 
Anna

Not all sensors are created equal: a framework for evaluating human performance measurement technologies

February 24, 2019

Not all sensors are created equal: a framework for evaluating human performance measurement technologies

Recent years have witnessed an explosion in the number of wearable sensing devices and associated apps that target a wide range of biomedical metrics, from actigraphy to glucose monitoring to lung function. This offers big opportunities for achieving scale in the use of such devices in application contexts such as telehealth, human performance and behaviour research and digitally enabled clinical trials. However, this increased availability and choice of sensors also brings with it a great challenge in optimising the match between the sensor and a specific application context. There is a need for a structured approach to first refining the requirements for a specific application, and then evaluating the available devices against those requirements. In this paper we will outline the main features of such an evaluation framework that has been developed with input from stakeholders in academic, clinical and industry settings.

The full article can be downloaded below.  

Name: 
Anna