FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE
September 19, 2007 |
CONTACT: Linda Paris, 202-365-3343
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Tele-health Experts Cite Broadband as a Healthcare Solution During Congressional Staff Briefing
Practitioners and Patients Highlight Power of Tele-health to Improve the Effectiveness and Efficiency of Health Care Delivery; Panelist Told Staffers, “Health Care Anytime, Anywhere, Anyhow is Possible with Broadband”
Washington, D.C., September 19, 2007 – Today at a congressional staff briefing pioneers in the tele-health field urged more investment and deployment of universal broadband for better health care. The panel discussion was sponsored by the Alliance for Public Technology (APT), the Communications Workers of America (CWA), the Center for Tele-Health at the Medical College of Georgia, and the E-Health & Telemedicine Division of the ISIS Center at Georgetown University.
To open the briefing, Joy Howell, the moderator and director of APT’s Broadband Changed My Life! Campaign, framed the conversation by saying, “Recently we’ve heard many of the top Presidential candidates lay out plans to get more health care coverage to more people. And at the heart of those plans is the concept of health care savings and greater efficiency of health care service delivery. Some reports have estimated savings of $800 billion in health care costs from increased use of broadband to provide health care services.”
Based on their personal experience, practitioners and patients highlighted the power of tele-health systems that utilize broadband Internet connections to enhance and even save lives while cutting medical costs, especially in rural and remote communities. Tele-health “has changed my life as a practitioner,” said panelist Max Stachura, M.D., director of the Center for Tele-health at the Medical College of Georgia. Observing that specialists can be spread out in rural areas, he pointed out that “resource sharing is what makes tele-health work in rural communities.”
Several panelists stressed the benefits of remote monitoring for chronic conditions, such as diabetes and hypertension. Betty Levine, Director of E-Health & Telemedicine Division of the ISIS Center at Georgetown University, echoed these themes. Speaking about MyCareTeam, an online application for managing diabetes, she explained that, “For individuals with chronic diseases, self-management is critical if one is to stay healthy and keep their disease well controlled. MyCareTeam is a virtual clinic that provides a person with diabetes the tools necessary to care for their disease while receiving support in between scheduled office visits.”
Panelist Cherrel Christian, R.N., a nurse at the Diabetes Center at Prince Georges Hospital Center, gave an example. “When an expectant mother with gestational diabetes moved from the DC area to Arizona, a resident still checked her blood sugar and gave her advice remotely over a three week travel period until she reached her new clinic.”
Later, Ken Kelly, Director of the Washington Office of the Children’s Partnership, told congressional staffers about another tele-health success story. According to Kelly, “Telemedicine plays a huge role connecting children to specialty care.” He said, “We met a woman who traveled with her son as far as 320 miles in a day to see various pediatric sub-specialists. Now her son visits a clinic ten minutes from their home to see a neurologist 600 miles away through telemedicine.”
Kelly also urged the federal government to encourage states to use Medicaid funding to pay for care delivered through telemedicine. Washington is in the unique position of being able to provide incentives for specialists to participate in telemedicine as well as to conduct research for evaluating telemedicine programs.
Dr. Jay Sanders, M.D., president and CEO of the Global Telemedicine Group, wrapped up the opening statements. He told staffers that “broadband provides an umbilical cord for information to flow between patients and practitioners. The exam room has to be where the patient is, not where the doctor is. That’s where we get the true physiological state of a patient.”
The briefing is part of a series of events produced by the Alliance for Public Technology’s Broadband Changed My Life! Campaign to demonstrate how broadband access is transforming every aspect of people’s lives.
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About APT
The Alliance for Public Technology is a nonprofit membership organization based in Washington, D.C., which was founded in 1989 to foster public policies that ensure access to advanced telecommunications technologies for all Americans.
