Telecommunications providers see a chance in telemedicine

Once skeptical to these services, Telecommunications providers are changing their ways and starting to offer „telemedicine“ services. This change, however, has a lot to do with do new ideas how to reimburse their services.

Namely, in collaboration with providers of medical services, they started making electronic medical and clinical records that can be always available online, and accessible by doctors and patients. The emphasis in the beginning will be discontinuing paper archives in favor of electronic ones. But they don’t plan to stop there, working with medical institutions themselves, they plan to survey doctors work. For October, year 2012, a system which would penalize doctors whose patients would return to hospitals in less than 30 days with chronic symptoms that could have been discovered at their last visit, is planned. If a patient with a chronic condition such as heart problems or pneumonia is readmitted, but was treated less than 30 days ago, the doctor that treated him will have less financial reimbursement. Idea is to make doctors take a more holistic approach to their patients care. More information was published on InformationWeek's web pages.