Why Telehealth?

Telehealth, aka telemedicine, is one of the most important trends shaping the future of healthcare. It is one of the most effective and direct ways to achieve the triple aim of cost, quality, and access.

This blog post will attempt to explain the underlying problems in the healthcare delivery system that telehealth addresses. As a result of solving these problems, telehealth creates value along all dimensions of the triple aim.

Healthcare delivery is fragmented across medical discipline, location, and time. In a given location, it can be difficult to get the right specialist to a patient in need. Specialists are busy and have full schedules in their clinics everyday. Specialists don't want to leave their clinics and patients don't want to go to the specialists' clinics. The cost of travel - time, cost, and distance - is significant for all parties. Neither party wants to travel to see the other.

Within a given location, there is almost always significant supply and demand imbalances for healthcare services. Telemedicine addresses the supply and demand problem by making location irrelevant. In a world in which telehealth is the norm instead of the exception, a patient in need should be able to access a qualified specialist from a much larger pool than in the analog era of healthcare delivery. Solving the access problem by increasing supply in every location also addresses cost and quality problems. Telemedicine addresses cost problems by forcing providers to compete to provide the best care at the lowest price. Telemedicine addresses quality problems by reducing the time to care, which can meaningfully impact outcomes.

At Pristine, we're proud to pioneer a new avenue of telehealth. Our telehealth solutions are by far the lightest-weight and easiest to use in both physical and virtual terms. Are clients don't need any physical infrastructure or local servers at their local sites. In fact, our clients don't even need to install software on their Macs and PCs. Everything runs natively in the web browser in beautiful HD.

Our clients - UC Irvine, Brown, and soon to be several more - are using our solutions every day to address the supply-demand challenge of healthcare delivery, and as a result, are working towards the triple aim.

Onwards and upwards!