Hospitals in a world of Videoconferencing

In other words, this is a remote health management system. The market for remote health management has been rapidly growing especially since the beginning of the twenty first century. Let’s try to understand the concept in depth before we dig through the nuances of this methodology.

Concept Overview

Remote health management as the name suggests is an advanced form of home health management through devices and robust networks. Remote health management is highly advantageous because of the following:• It saves costs pertaining to hospital admissions.• It helps expand several healthcare services to people in rural areas.• The doctor would be available at emergency situations to assist his/her patients.

Scientia Advisors, a strategy consultation group based in Cambridge, Massachusetts had predicted that the RHM (Remote Health management) industry would grow to about 3.6 billion dollars by the end of 2012. Almost 10,000 Medicare-approved health care agencies which focus on home healthcare management have started utilizing several RHM services.

Types and Adoption

There are two subdivisions within the RHM market. These include Tele health which as the name suggests involves remote monitoring of several chronic conditions of patients. Further, this system of Tele health is also important in terms of health coaching, wherein the patients are trained to understand their condition better and do the needful in cases of emergencies where no one is around. Today, there are several countries which are adopting telemedicine and these include India, Nepal, Pakistan, Australia, several regions of Africa and certain portions of the United States of America, Canada and United Kingdom.

Let’s look at a couple of instances. Scotland, with its vast array of remote locations which do not receive proper healthcare services is well ahead with regards to deploying remote healthcare management techniques. In the year 2006, the Scottish Center for Tele health was formed which right now, is responsible for several e-health and telemedicine projects in the country. Another success story was observed during the massive 2005 earthquake at Pakistan wherein as many as 160000 patients required immediate treatment for severe mental imbalances/ disturbances post the quake. The use of e-psychiatry technology was recommended by several leading physicians considering the fact that there were not many qualified resources to aid people in remote locations. As a result, the Institute of Psychiatry at Rawalpindi was set as the main center for all consultation which further connected all remote areas within the country. This mode of Healthcare Managementwas found to be greatly useful during the crisis.

The second aspect of the RHM market is the presence of remote patient monitoring devices/ gadgets. These include remote sphygmomanometers, remote ECG’s and the like. Devices which are not networked such as the stick which is commonly used for glucose monitoring are not included under the RHM umbrella. In short, remote patient monitoring (RPM) involves those devices that patients use themselves to gather relevant data and communicate the same to their physicians so that they can advise what is to be done next.

The field of Healthcare Technologyis vast expanding and the forthcoming piece would cover the growth of RHM with respect to several studies performed across the world.