The biggest change in healthcare is…no change

[Andrew Graley (andrewg)]

On 19th May, I hosted a Twitter chat (or a tweetchat) on collaboration technology usage in healthcare. The chat was hosted on the Polycom hashtag - #PolycomChat, where participants from all walks of life came together on Twitter for 60 minutes to discuss UC in healthcare. I was accompanied by two other panellists – Mark Evans (@Mark_j_evans), Commercial Director from Imerja (a channel partner to Polycom) and Veronica Southern (@TelerehabSLT), Director at Telerehab Speech & Language Therapy, who was until recently an NHS Extended Scope Practitioner, Principal Speech and Language Therapist (Rehabilitation). Between the three of us, we brought the experience of UC technology, business channel and running the healthcare practice to #PolycomChat. With Polycom opening its doors on Twitter, telemedicine and healthcare conversations were re-ignited and I found the event to be thoroughly engaging.

The biggest change in healthcare, I anticipate, will be if the existing services are provided uninterruptedly in the same manner. We don’t want to change healthcare services. We want the services to become more efficient and modern. Patients should be able to see the doctor when in need, specialist care should be accessible, and the system should stay intuitive towards the social aspects of patients and healthcare consultants’ lives. All this can be achieved via UC; it will change service delivery and make it more efficient, but not the service itself. This was the main conclusion and we found the participants of the healthcare tweetchat in agreement.

The other interesting point of note that demonstrated what has not changed in healthcare was that a few still believe that video is used for saving money. While the point is undoubtedly valid, it certainly cannot be placed on the top of the list. This point in particular led to a series of discussions where panellists tried to position the argument of securing business/service objectives via video above the fiscal benefit achieved via video.

Today I wanted to highlight these two changes that will undeniably have a major impact on telehealth. We are already witnessing a growth in demand of telemedicine – a recent report revealed that the market is expected to grow by 18.4% during 2014-2020.  There is no doubt that change in perspectives will be beneficial for the industry as a whole.

You can view all of the video responses to #PolycomChat on Polycom Europe’s FaceBook page.