Nov 04 What if we made better use of telemedicine and stopped failing the elderly?

Nicole and Cooper are joined by Dr. Bobby Park of RelyMD to discuss how telemedicine could transform the health care system.

Technology needs to be simple because we are expecting the consumer to change their behavior and in healthcare that is very hard.  People are used to calling their doctor’s office and requesting an appointment or driving down to the urgent care or ER.

Physicians are not adopting telemedicine because there is no financial incentive to do so.  We have all of the technology in the world to make telemedicine completely relevant but no legislation aimed at solving the reimbursement issue.

We are failing the elderly.

• SNF patients are being ping-ponged back and forth between the ER and the facility.
• Communication is failing- the packet of information that all facility patients must come to the ER with make it in the hands of the ER doc about 50% of the time (anecdotally)  and by the time the ER doc sees the patient to find out what was going on the nurse at the facility is probably off shift resulting in over treatment because the patient will undergo a lot of probably unnecessary tests to find out why they came in the first place.

Check out this episode on Libsyn