Home Visits Coming Back? How about Tele-home visits!?

An exiting article aired on NPR Morning Edition today. I really do hope that home visits make a return to physician practice, but I'd like to see tele-home care become part of the model too....

On the program, one physician is making home visits, and accessing the patient's EMR using his laptop. Dr. Eric Beachy, making his home visit mentioned the challenges that remain in remote areas with lack of connectivity, but the advantages are many. There was some mention that newer, younger physicians thought this might be old fashioned. But he could be making the same visit using telemedicine.

I'd like to see this taken a step further... It's great that the physician is visiting face to face, but I think it's the right time for tele-home care to finally open up!

In the late 1990s I worked for a vendor on a home care product. I was lucky to be able to make a home visit to a patient with COPD and Diabetes via telephone and television (no PC was involved with this program). I was in Lawrence KS and the patient was hundreds of miles away in Western KS. The research project which ended around 2000 was able to show a very significant reduction in re-hospitalizations and ED visits when the nurse could visit more frequently via tele-home care. (The patients were remote and more frequent visits were expensive and time consuming)

I still believe that tele-home care, home monitoring and other telemedicine options are going to be important in managing / maintaining the health and wellness of our population in the future.

The Homecare Technology Association of America has been working on this for many years already - http://www.hctaa.org/accomplishments.html

Please check out the radio program:
Old-Fashioned Medicine Needs Assist From WiFi
http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=113018106