While telemedicine grows as a desired offering in the healthcare industry, the physical technology of the service is hindering telemedicine's growth, according to a blog post by Humayun Chaudhry, MD, president and CEO of the Federation of State Medical Boards.
The post, published on the Congress blog on The Hill, suggests that the existing technology infrastructure doesn't match the pace of the growth of telemedicine.
The technology infrastructure includes fee-for-service medical reimbursement, lack of access to broadband Internet and weakness in physician education and training about technology, Dr. Chaudhry wrote.
According to the Alliance for Connected Care, only 14,000 out of 43 million Medicare participants receiving care in 2009 received telemedicine care, largely citing geographic and site restrictions on Medicare reimbursements to physicians as the main barrier to higher adoption rates.
Dr. Chaudhry mentioned the Model Policy on the Appropriate Use of Telemedicine Technologies in the Practice of Medicine developed by FSMB as a good step forward in providing guidance and a roadmap for state medical boards when overseeing the growing use of telemedicine technologies in healthcare. The model was unanimously adopted by representatives of the country's state medical licensing boards, according to Dr. Chaudhry.
The guidelines are advisory and "reflect a good faith effort by state medical boards to offer constructive solutions to some of the challenges facing telemedicine," Dr. Chaudhry wrote, but he added there is still plenty of need and room to grow.
"If telemedicine is to succeed…the technology supporting it needs to improve and be more interoperable," Dr. Chaudhry concluded. "Congress should examine policies that modernize the delivery of medical care while protecting the quality of care for patients….In the end, we can't succeed in a smartphone world with a flip-phone infrastructure."
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