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Videoconferencing patient to the doctor could save $ 104 billion a year
Scene from the series "House", an episode of «Frozen», 4 season 11 series. The plot of the episode is based on the fact that the main character has to advise the patient, located on the Antarctic station. I> sup>
A study of one of the largest investment banks Goldman Sachs показало, that the use of video conferencing instead of direct patient doctor visits will lead to potential savings of $ 104 billion a year. And this, in most cases (we are talking about the United States) have a sufficiently developed infrastructure and it is suitable for this software, such as Skype or Facetime.
Quantitative evaluation of medical practice in the United States in terms of medical visits was given during the study National Ambulatory Medicare Survey in 2010. According to the researchers then Americans visited a doctor in the hospital around 3.32 times during the year. On the basis of certain assumptions Goldman Sachs analysts David Roman (David Roman) Conley and Kyle (Kyle Conle) evaluated the growth of this indicator at the moment up to 4 times a year. As a result, calculations show that physicians spend about 1.3 billion-person counseling patients a year. Given the existing specialists statistics they concluded that about half of these visits could potentially do without actually visiting the hospital and weaning time a medical practitioner.
The economic rationale of its output Novel and Conley confirm such figures: the average visit to the doctor costs about $ 200, while specialized services, such as the Doctor on Demand for example (them with a certain degree of conditionality can be called service as a service, SaaS), cost to the patient Only $ 40. This ultimately gives considerable savings of 75%. In addition, the analyst, the US largest insurance company United Healthcare, specializing in medicine, has agreed to work with the three largest providers of medical services through video conferencing in order to cover the costs of patients for such consultation. However, reminiscent of Roman and Conley, may be a serious problem of trust in this type of health care, to overcome that, especially in elderly patients is likely to be difficult.
In early June of this year, Russian Health Minister Veronika Skvortsova given to understand that in Russia the issue of counseling patients on Skype already settled. To do this in the next two years in each settlement will be held fiber-optic cable to midwife and hospitals have not experienced problems with communication and the Internet. As in Russia at least 83,000 villages whose population does not exceed a hundred people, and the opening of the hospital there is impractical, the telemedicine will exit from this situation, the minister said.
Source: geektimes.ru/post/252724/
