Feature
The Doctor Will “See” You ...
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Doctors and healthcare facilities participating in telehealth programs are seeing
financial benefits. In a University of California, Davis study telehealth consultations
decreased the number of patients being transferred by 31 percent resulting in savings
on expensive ambulance transfers.
What about reimbursements? While navigating around telehealth policies and
Doctors and healthcare facilities
participating in telehealth programs are
reimbursements can be tricky, the bottom line on Medicare and
telemedicine is – Medicare is reimbursing for more telehealth
services now and the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services
is adding more eligible Current Procedural Terminology (CPT)
seeing financial benefits.
codes every year. That’s good news for everyone!
Let’s not forget the role that telehealth plays in optimizing senior care in place. By
combining collaboration tools and peripheral devices at the point of care, facilities
can offer increased levels of provider
interaction for high-risk patients. Plus,
administrators experience greater control
of their facility’s capacity by requiring
fewer transfers and patient readmissions,
which equals fewer empty beds, increases
in referrals and a higher quality of life and
health status for the patients.
We can only imagine what telemedicine
will look like in 2020. But with ideas
like using Google Glass to automatically
transcribe medical records during a patient
exam, you can bet that it will look dramatically different than today. And who
knows, someday soon we may even be using robotic fingers from afar to facilitate
virtual hands-on visits.
MaryAnn Benzola, director of business development, Custom Computer
Specialists can be reached at www.customtech.com.
1
NTT Data. (2014). Trends in Telehealth [White paper]. Retrieved June 2, 2016, http://americas.nttdata.
com/Industries/Industries/Healthcare/~/media/Documents/White-Papers/Trends-in-Telehealth-WhitePaper.pdf
C2 Solutions: News and Press Releases. (2015). [White paper]. Retrieved June 2, 2016, https://www.poweredbyc2.com/details.aspx?p=BFC9674642988AE3&ppid=94350&beid=0DEC3E4079E23759
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Adviser a publication of LeadingAge New York | Summer 2016