Wireless Medical Blog
Why are telehealth hubs so expensive?
By Vaishali Kamat - Last updated: Tuesday, April 27, 2010How do you create a cost effective telehealth hub for the home? That is the question that I have tried to answer in my work with Cambridge Consultants.
As a result we have developed telehealth hub solutions that minimise the hardware cost, and minimise complexity. As you may have seen from my previous blog posts on the overlap with Health2.0 I believe that the simple and invisible solutions are often the best.
A number of recent developments seem to show a trend toward expensive PC based devices for the delivery of telehealth services. This includes the announcement last week of the first Continua certified telehealth manager - a Panasonic toughbook tablet PC. Silicon provider Marvell last week also launched a tablet PC focused on telehealth. These solutions are similar to the Intel Health guide product shown below – essentially a low end PC with touch screen interface. As a result they are expensive items that are not going to fit the cost sensitive world of healthcare delivery.
There are some lower cost systems from providers such as Tuntstall, Bosch, and imetrikus, but even these solutions are relatively expensive.
It is challenging to create a low cost product that is attractive and simple to use. As I mentioned in my previous post Vitality RX seem to have produced an attractive system.
One example of how to do this successfully is our client Clipcomm. They have used our powerful Bluetooth development tools to create an attractive low cost hub for telephony. The Bluetooth phone adapter shown below enables users to route landline calls to a Bluetooth headset. It has a simple user interface, and connects to your existing phone line.
If only telehealth hubs were so simple – watch this space….
pharmacy tech Said,
January 23, 2011 @ 5:56 am
Keep posting stuff like this i really like it