Foundation Provides Grants for Telemedicine to Healthcare Providers

PALM DESERT, Calif. - Nov. 22, 2013 - PRLog -- The National Telemedicine Foundation is providing grant money to medical providers to entice and promote the usage of telemedicine, specifically for chronically ill populations.

The National Telemedicine Foundation’s Mission is providing development fund Grants to all Hospitals, ACO's and Community Health Centers, wishing to embrace Remote Monitoring of their chronically ill patients through telemedicine.

Chronic issues represent more than 75% of all healthcare spending and telemedicine can reduce that number significantly.  The grants provide the expensive up-front and development costs needed to establish a telemedicine program.  These costs have kept many hospitals and ACO’s and physician groups from adopting telemedicine.

“While telemedicine may not be the panacea for all the ills in healthcare,” says Alexa von Speyer, Executive Director of the Foundation, “it goes a long way to reducing costs and providing access to healthcare professionals in times of need.  These are crucial and desirable advantages in days where there are not enough primary physicians, where we are seeing increased populations in our system and costs are continuously rising.”

The Foundation promotes telemedicine and specifically Remote Patient Monitoring (RPM) as a viable and sustainable option in the management of more than 130 Million chronically ill Americans. RPM provides improved quality of life, independence and improved adherence to drug regimens. RPM is proven to be useful to homebound older adults who have difficulty accessing care due to disability, transportation, or isolation. Remote patient monitoring targets reducing the frequency of hospital admissions (re-admissions), visits to an emergency department and increasing accessibility of interventions.

A comprehensive or qualified telemedicine program will consist of 24/7 Remote Patient Monitoring by placing evolutionary video-conferencing enabled medical devices in people’s homes, furnishing instant access to MD’s or Nurses, using Medical Records to support care continuum, and establish connectivity through broadband, WI-Fi, Bluetooth, internet, wireless and satellite modalities.  Newer devices maintain high portability which allow people to move and function in their daily lives without being tethered to a home base.

Executive Director von Speyer went on to say, “Development costs may be the single largest barrier to the popular adoption of RPM services and that is where we will have the greatest impact. Healthcare can become sustainable. In addition to cash resources, we provide the guidance and leadership to select qualified programs and then, both integrate and assimilate these effective and proven RPM services into the existing plant resources, reimbursement and business structure.”

Any US based healthcare provider may apply on line at http://www.nationaltelemedicinefoundation.org