Telemedicine, Unified Collaboration, and Holly’s Laptop

Community Guest Blog post by By Taliaferro Smith 

Unified collaboration coupled with today’s telemedicine technology seems the most likely transformative avenue.  Telemedicine is really nothing more than the application of new technology to the art and science of medicine that allows a practitioner to bridge the gap of distance between themselves and a patient.  There are certainly many benefits to breaking down barriers to care.

I just finished reading Scott Anthony’s blog ‘Lessons from my Daughter's Laptop.’

“Over Christmas, my wife and I were shopping for a present for our three-year-old daughter, Holly.

"She seems to really like working with you on your laptop," my wife said (clients who notice strange typos in emails . . . blame Holly!). "Why don't we get her a toy that encourages that interest so she'll be more familiar with the technology as she gets older?"

It seemed like a reasonable suggestion, so we bought her a "Dora the Explorer" laptop. Holly's had it a couple of months and enjoys it immensely, and I can take Dora's insanely irritating voice if it helps my daughter learn numbers and letters. Reflecting on the fact that Holly routinely plays with both our iPad and Kinect, I said to my wife, "I think the odds that Holly actually uses a laptop during her working career are pretty close to zero."

It got me wondering about the future of telemedicine and how what we know today as a leading edge concept, simply providing care at a distance via video-conference, will look like by the time Holly is a young adult.

Unified collaboration coupled with today’s telemedicine technology seems the most likely transformative avenue.  Telemedicine is really nothing more than the application of new technology to the art and science of medicine that allows a practitioner to bridge the gap of distance between themselves and a patient.  There are certainly many benefits to breaking down barriers to care. 

Today’s technology, however, can do so much more than just bridge distance and connect one practitioner to one patient.  It is as different as a cell phone is to the rotary phones I used as a kid.  This is where mobile unified collaboration can transform distance healthcare delivery.

I like a definition by Bill Haskins; “Regardless of who you are talking to, Unified Collaboration is simply about converging multiple collaboration solutions into a common user interface, or a tightly coupled and integrated user environment….When it's all said and done, UC is all about empowering your users to collaborate more effectively and efficiently.”

Perhaps, we should demand more of our telemedicine platforms and call them ‘Unified Collaboration Platforms for Care’ or even ‘Healthcare Electronic cLinical Platforms (HELP).’  A platform that manages and delivers a quality user experience (both patient and practitioner), is mobile, accessible, simple to use, and converges any solution (video-conferencing, web-conferencing, audio-conferencing, and productivity tools) should be today’s standard for telemedicine.

As the hub in a wheel of collaborative care, today’s practitioner can coordinate and converge patient, specialist, allied health professionals, and family.  Well coordinated care, whether at a distance or in-person, surely offers the best clinical outcomes.

For instance, an elderly patient at a skilled nursing facility is transported to a small regional hospital exhibiting what are believed to be symptoms of a stroke.  Utilizing existing mobile unified collaboration platforms such as CPORT Solutions’ MEDIPort, the attending doctor can access the patients’ EMR, consult with a neurologist via video-conference who will be able to see the patient as well as the attending and simultaneously receive diagnostic images and data needed for diagnosis.  If needed, the consulting neurologist can request the attending doctor video-conference in a colleague with a hand-held device or tablet who is attending a seminar on the opposite coast for a third opinion.  Finally, the patient’s family or emergency contacts can also be brought into the discussion via cell phone, real time, so that they are informed and can contribute any other clinical or legal information necessary. 

Many of today’s medical students won’t ever have the experience of a 12 foot cord on a rotary telephone that gave you the ‘mobility’ to close a door and talk privately with your friends.  The doctors of tomorrow are well versed and comfortable with technology.  Today, telemedicine enabled with unified collaboration tools on a single platform is the functional equivalent of the cell phone or iPad compared to the rotary phone or laptop.  Hopefully medical students and doctors that are today enjoying a broader adoption of telemedicine technology will be ‘playing’ with telemedicine platforms that are powered by unified collaboration tools.  I think, during their careers, the odds that the medical students of today will be using telemedicine platforms with only video-conferencing capabilities will be about as high as Holly using a laptop during hers.