Telemedicine Going Mainstream - Is Telefitness Far Behind ?

Reliable video conferencing is having great impact on a variety of industries with health care now being one. There are not enough doctors and in particular not enough specialists available when and where they might be needed. Furthermore, the cost of delivering care when patients don't have access is much more costly than the relatively less expensive alternative of telemedicine. As a result, firms like NuPhysicia have emerged to deliver physician services anytime and anywhere.

As NYT reporter Milt Freudenheim recently reported in his article, "The Doctor Will See You Now, Please Log On":

The interactive telemedicine business has been growing by almost 10 percent annually, to more than $500 million in revenue in North America this year, according to Datamonitor, the market research firm. It is part of the $3.9 billion telemedicine category that includes monitoring devices in homes and hundreds of health care applications for smartphones.

Christine Chang, a health care technology analyst at Datamonitor’s Ovum unit, says telemedicine will allow doctors to take better care of larger numbers of patients. “Some patients will be seen by teleconferencing, some will send questions by e-mail, others will be monitored” using digitized data on symptoms or indicators like glucose levels, she says.Eventually, she predicts, “one patient a day might come into a doctor’s office, in person.”

If reimbursements for lower cost options like telemedicine in "sick-care" are emerging, why not fitness and wellness which generate an even greater ROI ? The day is coming when a combination of the economic incentive for being well, and the available technologies for delivering high value wellness and fitness services to individuals via new tools like videconferencing will emerge. Watch the brief video on NuPhysicia and welcome to the revolution.