Early "Telemedicine"

Early “telemedicine” was viewed as an innovative approach for remote healthcare management. The promise of telemedicine was based on more effective delivery of quality healthcare services that would be available to everyone. The early telemedicine pioneers, however, had difficulty in delivering on the promise. These systems were found to be:

“Single function” devices, focusing primarily on monitoring of vital sign measurements only

Difficult for patients to use and difficult for providers to implement, use and provision

Reliant on a store and forward technology that impeded real-time communication

Proprietary, requiring proprietary vital sign measuring peripheral devices that had to be developed and manufactured by the telemedicine system provider

Not scalable as increasing the number of patients caused a disproportionate increase in systems, infrastructure, and technical staff

Inflexible in that the “hard coded” procedures in the systems were not adaptable to existing or new care treatments and procedures

Difficult to integrate to existing Electronic Medical Record systems

Simple remote monitoring of specific vital signs such as blood pressure, weight, temperature, and glucose did provide value in the form of reduced costs through the reduction in required nurse visits to the patients. Unfortunately, the procedures and processes associated with these measurements were simple and rigid as these systems were not designed to be flexible and accommodating to change and innovation. If a patient required additional functionality such as videoconferencing, they were forced to add a separate or stand alone component that was not integrated with the existing solution.

The telemedicine pioneers that founded their companies at the beginning of the 21st century were limited in their technology choices at the time. The limitations in the functionality that they provide today are directly attributable to the limitations of the underlying technology that their products are built on. At the beginning of the century, broadband wasn’t readily available. Open systems and the Internet Protocol were in their infancy and were not even a consideration for Healthcare applications due to their perceived instability and lack of security. The prevailing technologies at the time were the telephone infrastructure and the PC. All of the early telemedicine solutions, and almost all of the solutions that are available on the market even today, are built on these technologies.

eHealth Evolution

Early "Telemedicine"