https://www.iotworldtoday.com/wp-content/themes/ioti_child/assets/images/logo/footer-logo.png
  • Home
  • News
    • Back
    • IoT World 2020 News
  • Strategy
  • Special Reports
  • Galleries
  • Business Resources
    • Back
    • Webinars
    • White Papers
    • Industry Perspectives
    • Featured Vendors
  • Other Content
    • Back
    • IoT World 2020 News
    • Q&As
    • Case Studies
    • Features
    • How-to
    • Opinion
    • Video / Podcasts
  • More
    • Back
    • About Us
    • Contact
    • Advertise
    • Strategic Partners
  • IOT World Events
    • Back
    • Internet of Things World: San Jose
    • IoT World 2020 News
Iot World Today
  • NEWSLETTER
  • Home
  • News
    • Back
    • IoT World 2020 News
  • Strategy
  • Special Reports
  • Galleries
  • Business Resources
    • Back
    • Webinars
    • White Papers
    • Industry Perspectives
    • Featured Vendors
  • Other Content
    • Back
    • IoT World 2020 News
    • Q&As
    • Case Studies
    • Features
    • How-to
    • Opinion
    • Video / Podcasts
  • More
    • Back
    • About Us
    • Contact
    • Advertise
    • Strategic Partners
  • IOT World Events
    • Back
    • Internet of Things World: San Jose
    • IoT World 2020 News
  • newsletter
  • IIoT
  • Cities
  • Energy
  • Homes/Buildings
  • Transportation/Logistics
  • Connected Health Care
  • Retail
  • AI
  • Architecture
  • Engineering/Development
  • Security
ioti.com

Connected Health Care


The Benefits of Telehealth Step into the Breach Wrought by COVID-19

The benefits of telehealth practices have emerged in high relief during the COVID-19 era.
  • Written by Lauren Horwitz
  • 9th April 2020

As the globe reels from COVID-19, patients and practitioners have turned to digital methods to fill the gap wrought by the virus.

As of early April, more than 1 million people have tested positive for COVID-19, whose flulike symptoms can vary from mild to severe and which has caused more than 87,000 deaths  at the time of this writing.

Without a vaccine, physical distancing and aggressive testing have been the only tried-and-true methods to slow viral spread. That’s prompted an explosion in telehealth sessions to replace in-person care.

Telehealth enlists telecommunications or digital methods such as videoconferencing for remote communication with patients. But increasingly, connected devices are part of the equation, enabling remote patient monitoring as well as communication. With connected devices, patients can provide their practitioners with metrics on, say, heart rate, temperature, lung function and more.

Even prior to the emergence of COVID-19, telemedicine had gained favor to combat skyrocketing health care costs and lack of patient access to care. According to Mordor Intelligence, the telemedicine market will be worth more than $66 billion globally by 2021.

And according to the Accenture 2019 Digital Health Consumer Survey, 29% of respondents have used some form of virtual care — up from 21% in 2017.

But the emergency of a highly contagious virus has accelerated telehealth adoption, virtually overnight.

Cleveland Clinic, for example, expects more than 60,000 telehealth visits in March, compared with 3,400 in the prior period . That’s more than a 1,700% increase.

“Every once in a while, the world gets a wake-up call,” said Dr. Samir Qamar, a primary care physician in practice in Las Vegas and the architect of MedWand, a connected telehealth platform and device. ”If there were ever a time to understand the importance of telemedicine, it’s now.”

The Benefits of Telehealth

The promise of telehealth emerged prior to the current health crisis, but its potential has come into high relief as hospitals become overwhelmed with patients as well as to prevent from clinicians falling prey to the virus  as they treat patients.

One key benefit for telehealth is curbing skyrocketing costs. A study of chronically ill patients found that telehealth reduced emergency visits by half and hospitalizations by almost 90%.

Another key advantage of digital health sessions is the ability to provide care to more patients — often vulnerable populations in rural areas who lack convenient hospital access. In one study at the University of Virginia health system, patient satisfaction in rural areas increased by 30% and saved patients several million miles of travel.

Reducing costs and broadening access are also intertwined.

Patients who previously lacked access to quality care, said Jessica Groopman, research director and principal analyst at Kaleido Insights, can now get it.

“It extends access without additional cost,” Groopman said. “That is the biggest win.”

Another benefit of telehealth is its capacity to contribute to data sets that can identify trends, enabling predictive analysis. Over the past decade, data analytics have been critical in understanding conditions such as diabetes and various cancers.

In the case of COVID-19-focused analytics, practitioners can “contact trace” to analyze the spread of the virus, to understand the impact of behavior change on reducing spread, and to understand why some patients recover while others die. For some time, big data has been used to understand risk factors as well as genetic predispositions of illnesses such as diabetes and cancer.

With COVID-19’s  impact, researchers have already detected patterns in the virus’ spread, and have diverted medical equipment to higher-risk areas based on these conclusions.

A University of Texas Health Science Center at Houston team developed an AI tool that illustrated the need for greater intervention in the Greater Houston area to prevent spread of the virus. Stanford University researchers launched a data-driven model to predict outcomes of various intervention strategies.

Challenges to Telehealth Adoption

There are several challenges to telehealth, however. First, single-state licensing is the model for medicine in the U.S. While 24 states allow doctors to be licensed in multiple states, it can be costly for doctors to maintain multiple licenses. While the COVID-19 emergency has suspended the licensing requirements to enable practitioners to help patients across state borders, once the crisis elapses, the industry will need to address this restriction.

Reimbursement is also an issue. Only some 10 U.S. states provide reimbursement today for telehealth sessions as they would in-person visits. That will need to change in order for doctors to provide care and be compensated. Today, Qamar said, several doctors practicing in states without reimbursement policies are “working for free.”

Telehealth also requires robust broadband access. But according to some estimates, only about two-thirds of residents in rural populations have such access. These kinds of vulnerable populations are precisely those that need access to telehealth services but may be hamstrung by poor or no connectivity.

Another issue is data privacy. In April, for example, Senator Richard Blumenthal sent a letter to a CEO of a major videoconferencing company, asking for insight into the platform’s privacy and security practices, given the increase in teleconferencing during the COVID-19 pandemic, including for telehealth purposes.

Further, more than 1,700 new domains tied to this video platform have been registered in the last two weeks: A quarter of those were logged during the last week alone, and 4% contained suspicious characteristics.

As noted by Blumenthal, this “troubling history of software design practices and security lapses” poses significant privacy and safety risks. Individuals are confused about how their data is used in a variety of contexts, but want health care data private and secure.

MedWand’s Qamar said that security-by-design principles are critical to his HIPAA-compliant platform, which encrypts patient data.

Telehealth Poised for Scale

Despite the need for users and public policy to catch up with telehealth, practitioners believe it’s here to stay. While telehealth has been a popular concept for some time, COVID-19 has accelerated its push into the real world. Qamar said that he has seen an uptick in business by several thousand percent. “Telemedicine is here to stay in a very big way,” he affirmed.

Sequestered at home given their state’s respective shelter-in-place orders, practitioners gathered for “The COVID-19 Innovation Summit” — via video conference — on March 25 to discuss the impact of COVID-19 on the medical community.

As John Brownstein, chief innovation officer at Boston Children’s Hospital, observed, the industry has crossed the chasm in terms of digitizing health care.

“I don’t see us going back to the way things were, in a positive way,” Brownstein said. “We’ve opened physicians’ eyes, opened up the administrators’ eyes. Patients are recognizing the value. These kinds of digital practices [will] become core to the practice of medicine going forward.”

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Tags: Artificial intelligence/machine learning AI Connected Health Care Technologies Internet of Things World 2020 Conference Coverage

Related


  • Jetting to the Stars Using Containers for Development
    The Department of Defense develops for space travel, bombers and jets. It turned to containers for development to build and battle-test its mission-critical systems.
  • Predictions for Embedded Machine Learning for IoT in 2021
    Experts predict that embedded ML will make strides in 2021, as microcontrollers become more advanced and TinyML takes hold at the edge.
  • High-performance Edge Computing
    Enabling real-time and AI-driven analytics with High Performance Edge Computers
  • Mixed picture
    IoT Spending Is a Mixed Picture in 2020
    While COVID-19 has forced budget cuts for some organizations, the pandemic has also driven IoT spending increases for others.  

One comment

  1. Avatar Michael Wilamowski 5th May 2020 @ 4:51 pm
    Reply

    There are systems out there that can be considered as secure. ATT First Net for broadband usage and TeleMedicine from a company named General Devices out of NJ. These are used by EMS. Blumenthal needs to check these out first. HIPPA Complient and approved. Also First Net while it it used for Public Safety does have a requirement to 95% of the USA and then some. Piggyback on that system and rural markets should be covered.

Leave a comment Cancel reply

-or-

Log in with your IoT World Today account

Alternatively, post a comment by completing the form below:

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *

This site uses Akismet to reduce spam. Learn how your comment data is processed.

Related Content

  • Can Privacy-Preserving Machine Learning Overcome Data-Sharing Worries?
  • An Engineer’s Guide to Digital Twin Technology
  • How Rolls-Royce Exploits Internet of Things Data
  • Understanding AI Bias and AI Flaws in Decision Making

News

View all

Private LTE Market Projected to Grow to $13 Billion

12th January 2021

IoT World Announces 2021 IoT World Advisory Board

9th December 2020

White Papers

View all

Zero Trust Manufacturing: Navigating Complex Supply Chains to Build Trusted IoT Devices

27th January 2021

IoTConnect and How to Get Started

27th January 2021

Special Reports

View all

Cybersecurity Protection Increasingly Depends on Machine Learning

28th October 2020

Webinars

View all

Weber’s Journey: How a Top Grill Maker Serves Up Connected Cooking

25th February 2021

From Insights to Action: Best Practices for Implementing Connected Device Security

15th December 2020

Galleries

View all

Top IoT Trends to Watch in 2020

26th January 2020

Five of the Most Promising Digital Health Technologies

14th January 2020

Industry Perspectives

View all

IoT Spending Holds Firm — Tempered by Dose of ‘IoT Pragmatism’

1st December 2020

The Great IoT Connectivity Lockdown

11th May 2020

Events

View all

IoT at the Edge

17th March 2021

Embedded IoT World 2021

28th April 2021 - 29th April 2021

IoT World 2021

2nd November 2021 - 4th November 2021

Twitter

IoTWorldToday, IoTWorldSeries

#IoTpentesting is critical as #IoTdevices proliferate and #edgecomputing becomes the norm. dlvr.it/RrWr0Y https://t.co/LsMH1VJJFk

28th January 2021
IoTWorldToday, IoTWorldSeries

Zero Trust Manufacturing: Navigating Complex Supply Chains to Build Trusted IoT Devices dlvr.it/RrTDP4 https://t.co/fuH0GrHJrX

27th January 2021
IoTWorldToday, IoTWorldSeries

PKI: The Solution for Designing Secure IoT Devices dlvr.it/RrTDNF https://t.co/KBWcsksAQi

27th January 2021
IoTWorldToday, IoTWorldSeries

Five Guiding Tenets for IoT Security dlvr.it/RrTDGS https://t.co/Ss17Vn4sFw

27th January 2021
IoTWorldToday, IoTWorldSeries

📢 Announcing #EIOTWORLD Silver Sponsor @ONETech_AI! 💡 Learn more about sponsoring Embedded IoT World here:… twitter.com/i/web/status/1…

27th January 2021
IoTWorldToday, IoTWorldSeries

IoTConnect and How to Get Started dlvr.it/RrT1gl https://t.co/6Vci1hvOV2

27th January 2021
IoTWorldToday, IoTWorldSeries

RT @IoTWorldToday: #IoTsecuritytrends in 2021 will feature new threats given #remotework, #digitalhealth and #edgecomputing. https://t.co/S…

27th January 2021
IoTWorldToday, IoTWorldSeries

#IoTsecuritytrends in 2021 will feature new threats given #remotework, #digitalhealth and #edgecomputing.… twitter.com/i/web/status/1…

25th January 2021

Newsletter

Sign up for IoT World Today newsletters: vertical industry coverage on Tuesdays and horizontal tech coverage on Thursdays.

Special Reports

Our Special Reports take an in-depth look at key topics within the IoT space. Download our latest reports.

Business Resources

Find the latest white papers and other resources from selected vendors.

Media Kit and Advertising

Want to reach our audience? Access our media kit.

DISCOVER MORE FROM INFORMA TECH

  • IoT World Series
  • Channel Futures
  • RISC-V
  • Dark Reading
  • ITPro Today
  • Web Hosting Talk

WORKING WITH US

  • Contact
  • About Us
  • Advertise
  • Login/Register

FOLLOW IoT World Today ON SOCIAL

  • Privacy
  • CCPA: “Do Not Sell My Data”
  • Cookies Policy
  • Terms
Copyright © 2021 Informa PLC. Informa PLC is registered in England and Wales with company number 8860726 whose registered and Head office is 5 Howick Place, London, SW1P 1WG.
This website uses cookies, including third party ones, to allow for analysis of how people use our website in order to improve your experience and our services. By continuing to use our website, you agree to the use of such cookies. Click here for more information on our Cookie Policy and Privacy Policy.
X