Could the Future of Healthcare Not Include Telemedicine?

Recently the ATA (American Telemedicine Association) held their annual conference which looks at the telemedicine and telehealth industry. I’ve always wanted to attend the event, but they’ve never had it at a time or a location that worked out well for me. One of these days I’m going to add it to my schedule of healthcare IT conferences. Until then, at least I can follow along with the conference on Twitter.

Coming out of the opening plenary session was this really interesting quote about telemedicine tweeted by the ATA twitter account:

I’d probably add that Telemedicine is the natural evolution of healthcare and technology. In fact, it’s clear to me that there’s no practical reason we shouldn’t be doing telemedicine for a large portion of our interactions with the healthcare system. It won’t replace all of them, but it should replace a lot of them.

The title of this post asks the question “Could the Future of Healthcare Not Include Telemedicine?”

My answer to that question is that I see no healthcare future where telemedicine doesn’t play a major role. It’s taken us forever to figure out telemedicine reimbursement. We’ve made progress but still have a long way to go. However, I don’t see any reason why telemedicine would not be a part of the future of healthcare.

Or as Andrew Watson, MD said, “Telemedicine is the natural evolution of healthcare.” We’re going to naturally go there whether people like it or not. It’s hard to kick against evolution and that’s true for telemedicine too.

About the author

John Lynn

John Lynn is the Founder of HealthcareScene.com, a network of leading Healthcare IT resources. The flagship blog, Healthcare IT Today, contains over 13,000 articles with over half of the articles written by John. These EMR and Healthcare IT related articles have been viewed over 20 million times.

John manages Healthcare IT Central, the leading career Health IT job board. He also organizes the first of its kind conference and community focused on healthcare marketing, Healthcare and IT Marketing Conference, and a healthcare IT conference, EXPO.health, focused on practical healthcare IT innovation. John is an advisor to multiple healthcare IT companies. John is highly involved in social media, and in addition to his blogs can be found on Twitter: @techguy.

   

Categories