Why Do GE, Philips, Intel, Mayo Clinic Keep Repeating Telehealth Study?

Just asking . . .

Everybody's re-proving benefits of telehealth. When you put these together, you have to ask why. Why do large organizations not cite previous studies and instead spend money to prove the same point? We're not talking about drug trials here. We are talking about telehealth monitoring, a technology that has been around for a decade at least, that has been studied and deployed, but not uniformly reimbursed (which is the real problem here). So it's 2010, and GE Healthcare, Intel, and the Mayo Clinic are launching a year-long study of a “new” model of health care delivery, intent on "determining if home monitoring of patients with chronic disease will reduce hospitalization and emergency room visits." In this study, 200 high-risk Mayo Clinic patients will be monitored for vital sign changes (presumably using Intel Health Guide and some video conferencing) and evaluated in comparison to a control group treated in the “usual” manner. Sounds good.

Philips Healthcare releases their study results. Maybe after reading the GE press release, Philips decided to announce the preliminary results of a study funded by Philips and CARME (health service in Spain)—this time using the Philips MOTIVA telehealth offering. No surprise, this “innovative” use of telemedicine produced a 67.8% reduction in hospitalizations due to heart failure and a substantial improvement in the perception of quality of life (improved from a perceived quality of life), regardless of where study subjects’ perceptions started. Sounds good.

The Veterans Health Administration proved this in a 2008 study. Fortunately or unfortunately, depending on your perspective, the VHA study proved the same point with a similar population set suffering from chronic disease (and likely using Viterion's telehealth technology, since the report is featured on Viterion's Web site.) In this study of 17,025 patients over four years, the benefits revealed were a "25% reduction in the numbers of bed days of care, a 19% reduction in the numbers of hospital admissions after enrollment in the program, and a mean satisfaction score of 86%." The conclusion: “Enterprise-wide home telehealth implementation is an appropriate and cost-effective way of managing chronic care patients in both urban and rural settings." Sounds good.

So what is behind Philips and GE's restudying of the same problem? So I admit that I am in the dark on this. Why not go with the first study and implement? Is it that they didn't believe the VHA methodology? That it seems to have used a product other than their own? That the continuous rejustification of care outside an institutional or medical setting is required because executives in hospitals still refuse to believe? Or is it possible that insurance and government programs here and abroad refuse to participate in telehealth, perhaps because doctors refuse, and perhaps that is because reimbursement rates still don’t equal rates for face-to-face care?

Just asking.

By Laurie Orlov
Aging in Place Technology Watch Blog

[Originally posted March 1, 2010, at Laurie's Aging in Place Technology Watch Web site.]