It’s always great to hear about good uses of broadband. I’m always happy when the examples come from Minnesota. And with health care examples, it’s interesting to hear what a life-and-death difference technology can make – in this case in the
MinnPost reports on the latest technology developments at the Mayo Clinic…
There are demonstrable care upgrades with the telestroke program on all fronts, Demaerschalk points out. Those include better outcomes for patients, especially those who would otherwise be at a disadvantage because of rural-urban disparities in availability of care, and viability for rural hospitals that lack specialists and often must transfer patients far from home and lose those billings. And it also helps the Rochester-based Mayo Clinic system with new revenue from subscription fees that smaller hospitals pay for the telestroke service, not to mention growing Mayo’s business geographically without building or buying facilities.
Throughout the health care industry, people are looking for big wins from “telehealth,” the umbrella term for a whole range of ways to provide care through digital and telecom connections between clinicians and patients.
Telehealth is one major way that the health care system seeks to reform itself. It’s a means to reach the much-discussed “triple aim” of improving the quality of care for patients, improving the health of populations, and reducing per capita cost. Telehealth could contribute to achieving those goals because it has the potential to bring about big shifts in health care system capacity.
And other local health care facilities…
About two years ago, Fairview equipped all of its hospital ICUs with telehealth technologies—webcams, remote monitoring, a suite of capabilities resembling the Mayo telestroke platform—and connected them to a central hub and an advanced ICU team at the University of Minnesota Medical Center, a Fairview affiliate. The goal, says Dr. Terry Martinson, Fairview’s design principal and executive medical director for innovation and transformation, is to raise care to a consistent standard across all Fairview ICUs without having to move patients to a different hospital. As with the telestroke program, Martinson says this leverages the scarce resource of skilled, specialized physicians.
At the same time, he says, virtual care “keeps less complex patients out of the university ICU, so they have capacity and can accept the more complex patients.”
It was interesting yesterday at the Governor’s Broadband Task Force meeting when discussing the lack of broadband throughout much of the rural countryside in east central Minnesota, Maureen Ideker – task force member and leader of tele-health for Essentia – talked about the converging trends of treatment and monitoring strategies with electronic medical records. Broadband to the home is essential for both to be successful. For rural residents without broadband and for the health care providers who serve them, these means fewer treatment options, poorer communications between providers and patients, and higher costs.