Clinton Administration Advances Telemedicine Projects

Saying that "telemedicine offers us some of our best and most cost-effective opportunities for improving quality and access to health care," HHS Secretary Donna E. Shalala today announced a range of new activities to support telemedicine develo pment. The new actions include:

Funding for 19 telemedicine projects, affecting rural, inner-city and suburban areas, totaling $42 million
A demonstration project enabling Medicare to pay for health care services delivered via telemedicine

Telemedicine involves health care applications of telecommunications technologies, including television and the Internet. This can include providing medical care to patients at a distance: for example the use of live video to examine patients in remote l ocations or cable TV to provide in-home service for homebound patients. It also includes electronic transmission of patient records and X-rays; expert consultations; and education for health professionals, including those in rural and medically under-serv ed communities.

Federal efforts to advance telemedicine are coordinated by the Joint Working Group on Telemedicine, under the HHS Data Council and the Vice President's National Information Infrastructure Initiative. HHS is the lead agency for developing telemedicine hea lth applications.

"We want to put cutting edge communications technology to work helping improve health care for Americans," said Vice President Al Gore. "We are joining with academic centers, communities and the health care sector to move rapidly in develo ping the potential of telemedicine."

The 19 multi-year telemedicine projects, located in 13 states and the District of Columbia, are funded by the National Library of Medicine, a part of HHS' National Institutes of Health.

"The projects we are supporting will evaluate the use of telemedicine in a wide variety of settings, all the way from the care of newborns and children with disabilities, to the elderly and chronically ill, and those needing a range of specialist care," Secretary Shalala said. "These are imaginative and well-targeted projects that will help us determine how we can best use information via telemedicine for clinical decision-making."

Projects include:

Los Angeles -- Providing care to center city elderly and offshore islands
West Virginia Providing consultation with specialists for remote rural areas
Massachusetts Provide care to high-risk newborns and their families
Maryland Transmit vital sign data from ambulances to trauma centers
New York Improve disease prevention and manage chronic illnesses in home settings
Missouri Prevent adverse drug interactions among the elderly
Washington and other northwestern states Provide access to information for health care and public health in remote western areas
San Diego Provide patients with access to their own medical records
San Francisco Transmit brain and breast images for telediagnosis
Iowa Video consultations for patients with special needs, including children with disabilities or heart conditions and persons with mental illnesses
Missouri Connect rural providers in four communities
Indiana Provide rapid access to patient records for emergency situations, and transmit infection and immunization data to public health officials (2 projects)
Chicago Provide health care teams with computer systems to assist in outpatient care
District of Columbia provide telemedicine service for kidney dialysis patients
Massachusetts Improve availability of information on disease prevention and health care
Alaska Evaluate telemedicine applications for improving care in remote areas
Oregon Use teledermatology to diagnose and treat skin cancers and other skin conditions
Pennsylvania Provide rapid access to clinical images and other patient data to speed cancer diagnosis.

(** For details, contact National Library of Medicine press office, 301-496-6308.)

In addition, Secretary Shalala announced that HHS' Health Care Financing Administration is initiating a three-year experiment in which Medicare will pay for telemedicine services at 57 Medicare-certified facilities. The demonstration focuses on medical consultations, in which a primary care provider with a Medicare patient at a remote site consults with a medical specialist located at a medical center facility. The demonstration concentrates on rural areas where Medicare patients may not have access to nearby medical specialists.

"We want to use telemedicine to make high quality, specialist care more accessible at lower cost," Secretary Shalala said. "As the nation's largest health insurer, Medicare can help pave the way toward efficient use of these new technologies."

Telemedicine may reduce some transfers of patients from smaller health facilities to medical centers. Currently, Medicare and many other third-party insurers only cover "face to face" medical encounters.

Five telemedicine centers are taking part in the Medicare demonstration: the East Carolina University Project, North Carolina; the Mercy Foundation (Midwest Rural Telemedicine Consortium) Project, Iowa; the Iowa Health System Project; the West Virginia University Project; and the University of Michigan/Medical College of Georgia Telemedicine Project.

The Council of Competitiveness, a gateway.html policy forum of chief executives from business, academia and labor, called the HHS steps "a significant move forward in putting telemedicine to effective use." The council issued a report earlier this year, Highway to Health: Transforming U.S. Health Care in the Information Age, that makes recommendations for advances in several health information areas, including telemedicine. (For copies of the report, contact the council at 202-682-4292.)

Note: HHS press releases are available on the World Wide Web at: http://www.hhs.gov.

This article comes from Science Blog. Copyright � 2004
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