Providers

It’s impossible to summarize the 2014 American Telemedicine Association meeting for those unable to attend as it was impossible to see the whole thing even for those attending! ATA grows every year and this year was no exception – it was huge and it was exciting!! Believe me when I say I got quite a cardiovascular workout running between sessions and up and down the stairs between the conference rooms and the Exhibit Hall – which was probably a half-mile long and filled with vendors!

Telemedicine, telehealth, e-health, m-health – it’s all healthcare. But where would healthcare be today without informatics? Broadly, healthcare informatics deals with the resources, devices, and methods needed to optimize acquisition, storage, retrieval, and use of information in health and biomedicine. Imaging Informatics is the study and application of processes of information and communications technology for the acquisition, manipulation, analysis, and distribution of medical image data in particular.

Are you thinking about getting into telemedicine either as a service provider or using a service provider but have no idea what’s available, how to find customers as a service provider, or as a user find a service provider? Wouldn’t it be great if there was somewhere you could go to find out what’s out there and ask all the questions you have?

The inaugural Northern Arizona presentation of the Arizona Telemedicine Program (ATP) and Southwest Telehealth Resource Center (SWTC) telemedicine training conference was a resounding success, with a sellout crowd and nationally recognized speakers representing several high-profile Arizona telehealth programs. The ATP and SWTRC presented the full-day “Arizona Telemedicine Course: Applications, Infrastructure, Reimbursement” at Flagstaff Medical Center on Tuesday, April 1.

Tooth decay remains one of the most common chronic diseases of childhood especially for Arizona children.  Many Arizona Children start school with tooth decay, a disease that is largely preventable.  Early tooth decay can start in children as soon as the first teeth erupt and progresses with age.  By the time Arizona children reach 3^rd grade, over 75% of them have experienced tooth decay. Arizona’s oral health workforce is challenged by the high dental needs of the state’s children, especially in rural areas which extend into 80% of the state’s land.

For years telemedicine has had a significant barrier – interstate licensure. Clinicians regularly see patients in their offices who live out of state, but when it comes to telemedicine they have for the most part been prohibited from doing this. In fact, it is easier to see an out-of-state patient when they actually leave the country by telemedicine than when they stay home. This might all be finally changing.

Telemedicine is slowly making progress in terms of more and more CPT codes for reimbursement being approved each cycle. For CY 2014 there are 2 new codes that have been added to the list of Medicare telehealth services! The first one is CPT code 99495 for Transitional Care Management Services.

Report from a Workshop at the 2013 Academy of Psychosomatic Medicine

There are so many applications for telepsychiatry it is often hard to keep up with all of them!