Telehealth

Telehealth comprises all the communication and information technology that allows care professionals to manage patients remotely. By allowing patients to receive healthcare at home and reduce patient wait times and hospitals' costs, telehealth looks like a winning solution. Telehealth is still in its relatively early phases, but it has momentum: In September 2010, California launched the largest telehealth network in the United States.

RELATED STORIES:
California launches nation's largest telehealth network
Fifteen organizations receive $4M to boost telehealth efforts

 
Research shows telemonitoring helps control blood pressure
May 10, 2012 | Bernie Monegain
Patients receiving telemonitoring along with high blood pressure management support from a pharmacist were more likely to lower their blood pressure than those without the support, according to research presented at the American Heart Association's Quality of Care and Outcomes Research Scientific Sessions 2012.
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HHS gives innovation awards to 26 organizations
May 8, 2012 | Bernie Monegain
Health and Human Services Secretary Kathleen Sebelius announced Tuesday the first batch of organizations receiving Health Care Innovation awards. A total of $122.6 million will support 26 projects -- many underpinned by health IT, and all aimed at improving care, saving money and improving the healthcare workforce.
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mHealth poised to explode, expert says
May 7, 2012 | Diana Manos
Mobile health is poised to "explode" over the next decade, says Chad Udell, managing director of Float Mobile Learning, a mobile learning consulting, strategy and research firm based in Morton, Ill.
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UCLA targets malaria with online gaming
May 3, 2012 | Mike Miliard
UCLA researchers have created a crowd-sourced online gaming system in which players distinguish malaria-infected red blood cells from healthy ones by viewing digital images obtained from microscopes.
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Health 2.0 to showcase 10 'hottest' startups
May 2, 2012 | Bernie Monegain
Health 2.0 will unveil 10 of what it bills as "the hottest new companies in healthcare technology" at the Launch! session during Health 2.0 Spring Fling Matchpoint in Boston, May 14-15.
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Service providers and healthcare: A 'perfect storm' for a hot market
May 1, 2012 | Diana Manos
For service providers, including telephone companies, Internet and cable companies, cloud service providers and data storage providers, the healthcare market is heating up, according to experts at Cisco.
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Net Medical Xpress launches neurological telemedicine program
April 30, 2012 | Diana Manos
Net Medical Xpress announced Monday that it has launched a comprehensive neurological telemedicine program at Alta Vista Regional Hospital in Las Vegas, N.M.
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Physicians take new look at telemedicine
April 26, 2012 | Eric Wicklund
For years, the compelling argument for telemedicine has been that it allows patients to access doctors at anytime and from any place. Now doctors are finding that they can use telemedicine platforms to improve -- and in some cases expand -- their practice.
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IT seen as critical to population health
April 24, 2012 | Bernie Monegain
Managing population health requires new skill sets, new infrastructures and automation, according to new research from the Institute for Health Technology Transformation.
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Psychological sensors to be incorporated in telehealth for service members
April 18, 2012 | Mike Miliard
A new telehealth sensing technology will enable providers to remotely monitor the psychological and behavioral health status of U.S. service members and veterans.
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Payers moving toward trigger-based communications
April 16, 2012 | Mike Miliard
A new study from IDC Health Insights finds that more than half of health plans will invest in trigger-based communications, which use data analytics to detect a consumer's current status, and automatically initiate relevant communications, to prompt plan members to take health and wellness action.
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VA to eliminate co-pays for telehealth consultations
April 13, 2012 | Eric Wicklund
The Department of Veterans' Affairs has long been an advocate of using telehealth to reach veterans in their homes. Now it is working to make adoption easier by fast-tracking a proposal to eliminate patient co-pays for in-home video telehealth consultations in its Home-Based Primary Care program.
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Lehigh Valley Health Network: Achieves 100% uptime and future-proofs network for Mission Critical eHealth and IT applications
May 3, 2012 | White Papers
Massive capacity, 100 percent uptime, and savings of $15,000 per month. By consolidating data, voice, SAN, and video traffic on the Ciena fiber optic network, leading US healthcare provider Lehigh Valley Health Network has achieved significant management savings. The Health network uses sophisticated medical applications such as advanced diagnostic imaging, Electronic Health Medical Records (EHMRs), and video conferencing to deliver the best patient care. To ensure constant uptime for its critical systems and ramp-up disaster recovery provisioning, they turned to Ciena for their converged fiber-optic network.
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May 22nd @ 2PM ET--A Smarter Approach to Healthcare PC Virtualization
April 25, 2012 | Upcoming Webinars
There's been a lot of talk of PCs going the way of the woolly mammoth (Post PC era anyone?). With cloud computing, wireless broadband and distributed workforces, are organizations moving to a new era of tablets and thin clients as the new survival tools? The question is hotly debated and intertwined with three equally hot trends: PC virtualization, cloud computing, and the consumerization of IT. Join IT experts from Intel and Virtual Computer for a webinar with live Q&A to learn about what's really happening with PCs, thin-clients, and tablets in healthcare.
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May 10th @ 1PM ET--Care Delivery Applications: Improving Nurse Productivity & Communications
April 24, 2012 | Upcoming Webinars
Hear from leaders at Parkview Health System and Avaya on how you can leverage mobile devices to improve communications and patient care, while increasing nurse productivity. Leverage the learnings from Parkview as they launched new tools to have the technology find the expert versus having the staff search for the right resources. Consider how mobile technology can allow clinicians to communicate from where ever they are and to share EHR clinical information quickly, easily and securely.
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Disruptive Innovation: The Key to Empowering Patients, Transforming the Healthcare System
March 29, 2012 | White Papers
The United States is undergoing a major transformation of its healthcare delivery system, driven by federal health IT investments and healthcare reforms. This content piece features information from a joint presentation at the HIMSS12 Annual Conference & Exhibition in Las Vegas in February, where Eric Dishman, General Manager of Health Strategy and Solutions at Intel Corporation, and Jason Hwang, MD, executive director of healthcare at the Innosight Institute, presented on the power of “disruptive innovation” to meet the challenges of transforming the U.S. health sector. Download this paper to read examples of how disruption health IT innovation is driving new care models across the globe.
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Beyond the Checkbox: Using Health Information to Continuously Engage Patients and Improve the Patient Experience
March 22, 2012 | White Papers
The U.S. Dept. of Health and Human Services announced in February 2012 that nearly 2,000 hospitals received incentive payments under the CMMS’ <a href="/directory/electronic-health-record-ehr" target="_blank" class="directory-item-link">EHR</a> Incentive Programs. In addition, 85 percent of hospitals now report that by 2015 they intend to take advantage of the incentive payments. With the competitive inpatient market moving toward critical mass, many hospitals face the challenge of meeting Stage 1 MU criteria. Forward-thinking hospitals and health systems are approaching patient education beyond checking a box on their way to qualifying for incentive payments. Learn how Ochsner Health System now provides consistent patient education materials based on evidence-based medicine to its clinicians across its seven hospitals and 40 clinics.
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Redefining Value and Success in Healthcare: Charting the Path to the Future
March 13, 2012 | On Demand Webinars
Across the healthcare industry, we are seeing forward-thinking organizations develop new competencies in anticipation of the opportunity that comes with industry-wide transformation. They are positioning themselves for success. And they are defining the future of healthcare. Will your organization be ready? Register to learn more and listen to the session now!
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Clinician Mobility: Leveraging Mobile Devices For Clinical Communications at Penn Medicine
March 5, 2012 | On Demand Webinars
Learn from Associate CIO, John P. Donohue at University of Pennsylvania Health System and Avaya How to Leverage Mobility and Network Readiness Solutions for Your Health System Clinicians. As the delivery of healthcare changes, UPHS is leveraging mobile communications technology to improve clinical communications. Integrating mobile communications with traditional telephony capabilities allows for more agile and responsive communications across the Health System.
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Disrupting Hospital Based Care: The Innovation Race to Establish 21st Century Care Models
March 2, 2012 | On Demand Webinars
Intel and Healthcare IT News invite you to an exclusive executive webcast featuring internationally renowned speakers, Jason Hwang, MD co-founder and Executive Director of Healthcare at Innosight Institute, a non-profit social innovation think tank based in Watertown, Massachusetts and Eric Dishman, Intel Fellow and Global Director of Health Innovation and Policy for Intel Corporation.
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Branch on Demand for Healthcare: Extending and Securing Access Across Caregiving Locations
January 5, 2012 | White Papers
Healthcare professionals need to focus on quality of patient care and on securing the patient data, even in the most remote locations. Network services provided to remote facilities, clinics, and offices depend less on the size of the location and more on the functions being performed at that location. Learn more about Branch on Demand, a cloud-enabled networking solution for remote locations that simplifies provisioning, management, security, and troubleshooting for these deployments.
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Wi-Fi Provides Rx for Healthcare Challenges
January 5, 2012 | White Papers
The healthcare environment naturally lends itself to wireless networking, given the inherently mobile nature of physicians, nurses, orderlies, and others who move from beds to examining rooms, ministering to patients. This paper looks at how healthcare providers are using wireless LANs creatively to improve patient care and to realize much-needed cost efficiencies. It also discusses the primary challenges health organizations face in their deployments and offers up solutions for successfully addressing them.
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An IDC Health Insights and Intel Webcast: mHealth and The Second Wave of Clinical Mobility
November 23, 2011 | On Demand Webinars
Driven by a history of innovation, Intel is focusing its game-changing technologies on transforming healthcare to enable connected, coordinated, cost-effective care based on each person's health goals and history, enhancing prevention, focusing treatment, and improving outcomes.
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Providing Wireless Technology for Healthcare Transformation
November 1, 2011 | White Papers
The U.S. healthcare industry is undergoing a game-changing transformation in the way it delivers care. The “meaningful use” requirements under <a href="/directory/health-information-technology-economic-and-clinical-health-hitech-act" target="_blank" class="directory-item-link">the HITECH Act</a>, the new payment and delivery reform model under the PPACA and the consumer movement are all converging to help create a system that improves the quality of care and clinical outcomes, drives workflow efficiencies, and reduces and manages cost. Forward-thinking healthcare providers, payers and suppliers are taking up the challenge and looking to health IT to enable the new delivery system. Healthcare stakeholders are embracing mobility technology as a viable solution. Learn how Verizon is leveraging its scale and reach to deliver a diverse set of wireless technology solutions for healthcare providers, payers and suppliers that enable communication, collaboration and secure information flow.
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Top 5 misconceptions of holding back the deployment of televideo in healthcare delivery
January 19, 2012 | Pete Eggleston
Until recently, the specialized equipment, complexity and expensive network infrastructure required by video, as well as poor Medicare/Medicaid reimbursement policies made it impractical to utilize televideo technologies for the delivery of care unless the patient was a great distance from the doctor.
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Dos and Don'ts of Telemedicine
January 18, 2012 | Shahid Shah
This is the next post in my series of Dos and Don’ts Healthcare IT. As we all know, some of our most important citizens live in rural settings, small cities, the countryside, or remote areas. In the past 15 years or so we’ve made some great strides in remotely accessible healthcare.
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Telemedicine is on the rise
January 3, 2012 | James Ellis and Aaron Razavi
As a progressive new form of quality and convenient health, telehealth practices are growing, especially in rural areas, as it improves quality, access and cost of care. However, with a reimbursement model not clearly defined, some physicians are still reluctant.
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mHealth in action: Twitter recap from #HIMSSVirtual
November 8, 2011 | Kelly Mehler
One of the education sessions last week at HIMSS Virtual Conference and Expo was "mHealth in Action: From Research to Practice in Metro Miami." In the briefing, the speaker went over his company's mHealth strategy, tackling issues with the use of standards-based mobile technology.
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mHealth targeting healthcare professionals
October 21, 2011 | Angela Dunn
While #mhealth or mobile health is taking the world by storm, Happtique, a mobile application store developed specifically for healthcare professionals, aims to make sense of it all. Happtique, Healthcare-APP-bouTIQUE, provides a growing app catalog of what it calls “hApps” or healthcare applications.
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New iPhone 4s features expand potential for medical use
October 14, 2011 | Chad Johnson
It’s simply amazing that Apple iPhones and iPads continue to dominate technology conversations, despite the impressive advances of competing Android smart phones and tablets. Further illustrated in the wake of Steve Jobs’s unfortunate death last week, Apple has done a masterful job of producing products that have become part of our lives that even pull the heartstrings of many of its dedicated users.
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'Don't have time' is the wrong answer
October 13, 2011 | Jon Mertz
We host weekly Tweet Chats called Health IT Social Media, or #HITsm. During one of our conversations, we were discussing why more hospital IT professionals, as well as other provider IT people, are not involved in social media. One of the answers was: “We don’t have time.”
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UnitedHealth on improving rural healthcare
August 3, 2011 | David Harlow
The UnitedHealth Center for Health Reform and Modernization released a white paper on Modernizing Rural Health Care.
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The downside of patient-centered medical homes: Social media conversations
July 25, 2011 | Kelly Mehler
The patient-centered medical home has great potential, but is it a viable model for healthcare delivery? Our social media followers weigh in.
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Radiology needs to reassert their IT leadership
July 11, 2011 | Jon Mertz
Radiology groups and imaging centers have been on the leading technology edge for many years. The leadership principles of radiology CEOs and CIOs shine in how they approach.
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Alaskan Healthcare IT Lessons Learned
July 6, 2011 | John Halamka
Alaska faces many healthcare challenges given its large area (663,268 sq mi) and population of 710,231 residents. The geographical challenge of delivering such widely distributed healthcare makes it a natural location for telemedicine.
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May the Fourth be With You...and Healthcare IT Innovation
May 5, 2011 | Jennifer Dennard
This blog may be a day late and a galactic credit short, but yesterday’s international celebration of Star Wars Day provides a fun excuse to compare “yesterday’s” healthcare with the current state of things, especially with regard to healthcare IT.
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Patient Advocates and American Well join to bring online care to Maine
October 25, 2011 | Industry News Release
American Well™ announced today that it has entered into an agreement with Patient Advocates LLC that will result in the deployment of the Online Care For Providers telehealth solution for Maine clients. Patient Advocates is a health care management company that employers and patients count on to navigate the health care system. It maintains relationships with leading medical centers in order to ensure access to the highest levels of appropriate care.
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Companies & Markets: strategic analysis of the European telemedicine market
October 20, 2011 | Industry News Release
Across Europe, improved access to technology and the need to reduce healthcare delivery costs have underpinned the search for cost-effective solutions. Telemedicine has proved to be an economical alternative to conventional healthcare delivery, while providing personalised solutions. These factors are expected to assist telemedicine in becoming an integral part of the healthcare system.
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CJPS Medical Systems shakes the world of telemedicine
October 17, 2011 | Industry News Release
In an unprecedented move, CJPS Medical Systems announces that it will no longer charge for any connectivity fees for caregivers to access patient data when using VitalPoint® HOME, its state-of-the-art remote patient monitoring system.
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GlobalMed’s telemedicine solutions now include the GE Vscan ultrasound device
October 3, 2011 | Industry News Release
GlobalMed – the industry-leading telemedicine design, marketing and manufacturing company based in Scottsdale, Arizona – has signed an agreement with GE Healthcare (NYSE: GE) to sell the Vscan™, its pocket-sized, portable ultrasound device. The agreement provides domestic customers who buy or have purchased GlobalMed’s i8500 Series Mobile Telemedicine Carts with the option to add the Vscan to their telemedicine program.
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Visiting nurse services of Connecticut selects Cardiocom® as its new Telehealth vendor
September 27, 2011 | Industry News Release
Visiting Nurse Services of Connecticut, one of the state's oldest and largest home health agencies, announces that it has entered into a business relationship with Cardiocom to provide advanced home telehealth technology to patients with chronic conditions using Cardiocom's new Commander FLEX™ device. Cardiocom®, Experts in Telehealth(SM), is a world class developer, manufacturer and clinical service provider of award-winning telehealth solutions.
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Tunstall Healthcare Group Limited to acquire American Medical Alert Corp.
September 23, 2011 | Industry News Release
American Medical Alert Corp (Nasdaq: AMAC), a leading provider of remote health monitoring and 24/7 communication services that enhances care, accelerates response times, improves operational effectiveness and delivers sustainable patient services, has announced today that it has entered into a definitive agreement to be acquired by Tunstall Healthcare Group Limited, a leading telehealth and telecare provider. Tunstall will acquire all of the outstanding common shares of AMAC for $8.55 per share in cash without interest, representing a premium of approximately 50% over AMAC’s closing share price on September 22, 2011, plus one Contingent Payment Right (CPR) per share providing a contingent cash payment for the holder of such common share in the event of a sale of AMAC’s interests in the Lifecomm joint venture or prior sale of Tunstall under certain conditions. The transaction is expected to close at the end of the fourth quarter of 2011.
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At Home Healthcare expands telehealth program With Cardiocom® Telehealth Technology
September 21, 2011 | Industry News Release
At Home Healthcare, a leading provider of home care announced it has entered into a business relationship with Cardiocom to provide advanced home telehealth technology to patients with chronic illness. Cardiocom®, Experts in Telehealth(SM), is a world class developer, manufacturer and clinical service provider of award-winning telehealth solutions.
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Shifting the cancer conversation: A new online patient program focuses on individualized cancer treatments
September 19, 2011 | Healthcare IT News Staff
As part of GE Healthcare's ongoing commitment to fight cancer, the company announced today a new online patient resource – www.IsMyCancerDifferent.com. The website, the first of its kind to focus on educating cancer patients about molecular-level testing, was launched at the Social Health Summit, a meeting that brings together patients, healthcare professionals, advocacy organizations and health bloggers.
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Good news for rural stroke patients: telestroke care is cost-effective
September 15, 2011 | Industry News Release
In this first-of-its-kind U.S. health economic analysis, researchers have found that using two way audio-video telemedicine to deliver stroke care, also known as telestroke, appears to be cost-effective for rural hospitals that don’t have an around-the-clock neurologist, or stroke expert, on staff. The research is published in the September 14, 2011, online issue of Neurology®, the medical journal of the American Academy of Neurology.
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CL&A, Healthy Start, MD partner
August 11, 2011 | Industry News Release
Curt Lewis & Associates (CL&A) today announced a strategic alliance with Healthy Start MD, a global wellness service firm headquartered in Webster, Texas with business concerns throughout the US and the international community. Curt Lewis & Associates is known for its expertise in the aviation industry, offering system safety, quality, and safety management system services and training, accident investigation, litigation support, and risk management solutions.
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Florida urgent care clinic uses power of smartphones
June 20, 2011 | Industry News Release
South Tampa Immediate Care today announced a new partnership with Healthagen to put medical and facility information into the hands of smartphone users with iTriage - a free mobile healthcare application. The increase in mobile phone subscriptions, specifically smartphones, has led the medical facility to expand its presence in the mobile community by providing on-the-go access to a variety of medical information.
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Statement from HHS Deputy Secretary Bill Corr on retrospective review of existing rules
May 26, 2011 | Industry News Release
Earlier this year, President Obama outlined his plan to create a 21st-century regulatory system that is simpler and smarter and that protects the health and safety of the American people in a pragmatic and cost-effective way. He called for a change in culture to incorporate ongoing review of regulations into our operations. We can target rules already on the books to increase flexibility and remove regulations that are out-of-date, unnecessary, excessively burdensome, or in conflict with other rules.
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