Last week I attended the American Telemedicine Association (ATA) annual conference in Austin.  For over 10 years I have been going to this conference – in person and remotely – to keep abreast of the latest developments in this unique segment of the healthcare IT industry.

More Than an Academic Experiment

As has been the trend for the last few years, the symposium portion of this year’s ATA continues to expand beyond academic proof cases to real-life discussions of implementing telemedicine programs and seeing quantifiable benefits.  No longer is the healthcare industry in a state of trying to prove the benefit of telehealth.  Now they are offering approaches to expand the scope and reach of healthcare services.  Instead of simple discussions of radiology transfer, the use cases focused on more expansive services, such as continuing care (e.g. diabetes management) and critical care (e.g. stroke victims). And one of our clients addressed the growth of the industry head on, moderating a panel on “The Challenges of Growth.”

The challenges raised within these sessions tended toward some of the common broad stroke issues facing the healthcare arena, including reimbursement and credentialing. Despite all the efforts to expand services to underserved populations, government regulations have remained behind technology capabilities.  Based on the tone of the symposium, the biggest obstacle to telemedicine becoming successful across the country is government regulation.  As in all markets, the business case (i.e. insurance reimbursement) is fundamental to driving investment and market maturation.

A Technology Show

Over the years, the ATA conference has had a split personality; the academic symposium that focuses on both esoteric issues of remote medicine and use case scenarios, and the exposition floor.  This year was no different.  Though, as with the more focused topics of the symposium, there appeared to be a convergence of the marketplace around the following types of technology:

1. Video – Every vendor had video integrated into their solution. This has been a trending technology focus of ATA for years and now it has reached complete ubiquity.
2. Tablets (typically iPad mini) – The introduction of tablets has changed vendors’ service offerings forever because they are low cost, portable and easy to program.  Instead of focusing on building hardware to suit their environmental needs, they write a program and find some way to ruggedize or secure the tablet.
3. Wireless peripherals (BP cuff, oxygen saturation meter, etc.) – Peripherals have always been a mainstay at ATA.  They are critical components in helping healthcare providers remotely monitor and diagnose their patients. The difference today is that the combination of wireless protocols, such as Bluetooth 4.0 and NFC, with flash memory has allowed devices to shrink in size and cost. And with portability and lower cost comes a much improved chance of widespread adoption in low density areas that require telemedicine services.
4. ROBOTS – Talk about the wow factor!  The hot gadgets of the show were robots with gyroscopic balancing (think segway) that can interact with patients remotely.  These devices are very cool, though their practical application and likelihood of adoption seems low.

Overall, ATA continues to be a good meeting place for likeminded individuals working to provide parity in health services available across the country.  The market has matured fantastically over the past decade, and I expect more maturation as issues like reimbursement and cross-border credentialing are addressed.

Looking forward to next year’s ATA in Baltimore!

Every day we see new survey findings in the news – everything from the cleanest city and the best beaches to the unhealthiest states and most stressful careers. Nationally known research companies such as Kelton Research, Gallup and Harris Interactive are making a killing organizing consumer surveys for foundations, corporations and consumer interest groups. However, these large-scale formal surveys can be costly.

But there’s good news: it doesn’t always take a $50,000 budget to conduct a survey of your key audience and make headlines. In fact, it can be done in the privacy of your own network and, oftentimes, the results are more telling and more accurate – a benefit of having control of your sample size.

Earlier this year, an RH client realized the power of the poll (for the second time!) and secured key industry headlines in order to reach their target audience with findings on an important industry topic – health insurance exchanges (HIX), an initiative of the Affordable Care Act that will open an online health insurance marketplace for millions of Americans later this year.

At a gathering of the company’s partners and customers last February, this client capitalized on a room full of senior healthcare professionals and healthcare payer decision-makers at their fingertips and asked them what their concerns are for the insurance industry shift to HIX and what it means for their businesses and relationships with trading partners. The survey results revealed some mixed emotions. It was clear that respondents recognize the business opportunities for participating in an exchange, yet there was skepticism that the state and/or federal HIXs would be ready for the October 1, 2013 launch day. And there lies your headlines:

• “On State Exchanges, Health Insurers Eager to Join, Wary to Operate”
• “Survey shows concerns about HIX deadline”
• “Insurers Doubt Fed’s HIX Readiness”
• “Six Months to Go –– Will the Health Insurance Exchanges Be Ready on Time? Survey: Health Plan Execs Don’t Think So”

In a push to healthcare industry trade publications and those following the health insurance industry, our team organized a cycle of pitching efforts that spread these findings far and wide. And in the end, the news garnered a total of 14 original articles in health, technology and insurance trade outlets and continues to bring in inquiries from our key reporters as they reference the survey data for future stories. Additionally, these findings and perspectives have equipped the team with fresh pitching content and supporting evidence for storytelling.

Companies that host partners, customers, or even industry peers should jump on the chance to hear their positioning on current trends or initiatives. Survey data is a surefire way to insert a company name in an existing news cycle or, better yet, be the creator of one.

A recent PBS special on the coming-of-age of Silicon Valley reminded me of the excitement I had dreaming up the seemingly endless uses for my family’s first home computer (a Timex Sinclair 1000, with 1.5k of built-in memory, circa 1982), and the epochal significance of the work everyone in the technology sector is doing today, more than 30 years later.

It’s easy to lose sight of this significance when we are busy tending to our individual duties in our day-to-day work, most especially if we are not the engineers or developers that dream this stuff up. But every person working in the technology sector – yes, marketers and public relations pros included – is contributing in an important way to a period that will be afforded at least equal weight with other great epochs, like the Age of Discovery and the Industrial Revolution.

And we are nowhere near the point of winding it down. More likely, we are at the earliest stages. I won’t pretend to be a technology historian, but I’m guessing many would claim the epoch began with large computers instructed by switches and punch cards, then shifted into high gear with the invention of the microchip, and exploded with the global Internet. Can there be much more to it? (Answer ‘yes’ if you fear a world where Facebook is the pinnacle of all technology innovation).

We are only just exploring what is possible when everyone is connected to every bit of knowledge and equipped with sufficient computing power to grok it. Consider the impact technology has on the realm of healthcare. We intuitively know, for example, that a physician with access to every revelation of medical research, and the computing power to analyze it all in a split second to prescribe the absolute best treatment plan customized for your genotype, is a thousand times more helpful to you than the isolated knowledge of a physician who is 30 years out of med school staring at your chart. But we’re not there yet.

And while we’re dreaming about those boundless possibilities, there are smart people working on 3D printing, the Internet of Things, quantum computing, and any number of other tantalizing concepts. Our imaginations can continue to run wild for years to come, just as they have been doing for the past several decades.

So what contribution do we, the people toiling away in public relations firms and marketing agencies, or in corporate communications and marketing departments, make to all of this? We all know there are plenty of great inventions that wallowed for decades only because the guy who got the patent didn’t have the first clue about how to share his or her idea with others. We are the ones who get the word out in language people can understand and embrace. The jobs we do help choose the winners and losers. Not everyone has to be a Steve Jobs or Mark Zuckerberg to take some credit!