Solutions for Healthcare

Blue Moon is a leading resource and advocate promoting access to medical care for consumers and health professionals via telecommunications technology. Blue Moon seeks to bring together diverse groups from traditional medicine, academic medical centers, technology and telecommunications companies, e-health, medical societies, government and others to overcome barriers to the advancement of telemedicine through the professional, ethical and equitable improvement in health care delivery.

Advantages of Telemedicine
Providing healthcare services via telemedicine offers many advantages. It can make specialty care more accessible to underserved rural and urban populations. Video consultations from a rural clinic to a specialist can alleviate prohibitive travel and associated costs for patients. Videoconferencing also opens up new possibilities for continuing education or training for isolated or rural health practitioners, who may not be able to leave a rural practice to take part in professional meetings or educational opportunities. It appears that the use of telemedicine can also cut costs of medical care for those in rural areas.

Blue Moon’s Telemedicine systems can be used to check blood pressure, heart rate, oxygen saturation, temperature and weight, in order to remotely monitor a patient's health. For patients, some systems offer 24-hour monitoring — a particularly important consideration for those who live alone. All systems allow an agency to monitor the health of more patients using fewer nurses, saving on the cost of home visits. Based on the cost of the devices and the wages saved through their use, cost savings per patient could be up to $900 a month, depending on the number of nurse visits the device replaces. For home health care agencies, it's an opportunity to save money and care for a larger patient load with a single nurse.

The Future of Telemedicine
It's not too much of a stretch of the imagination to realize that telemedicine will soon be just another way to see a health professional, just as seeing friends and family while talking to them on the phone is becoming commonplace. Farther down the road, it has been theorized that we each could have a 'Personal Diagnosis System' as part of our home entertainment centers. This system would monitor our daily health status and automatically notify a health professional if we become ill. (Kurtz 1994)

Ten years or fifteen years ago we had no idea we would rely heavily on faxes, answering machines and e-mail, tools which are now low-tech and taken for granted. In the mid-90's Ronald C. Merrell, from Yale University School of Medicine said, "The innovations we will encounter as we step beyond feasibility are dazzling in their potential." (Merrell 1995) In the early 21st century, the potential of telemedicine, telehealth and e-health is still left to our imaginations.

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