“I need to see a doctor about this.” Often implied in this statement is a face-to-face meeting in an office, but that doctor may actually be in another state or possibly halfway around the world. Telemedicine with the use of telecommunications and information technology is making it possible to provide healthcare from a distance for rural areas and emergency situations.
This goes way beyond the old days of telephone consultations to videoconferencing, client-server systems with mobile tablets and in-home remote monitoring systems. The key is the convenience of the system and the reliability and fidelity of the data.
Store and Forward, Interact, and Monitor
There are many different ways that the data can be used. The most basic is to gather the data, store it and then forward it at a later date. For example, that x-ray, CT or MRI may not be examined by a radiologist located onsite. Your information could be sent as far away as India for diagnosis. Advancements in Internet bandwidth and workstations have enabled images to be viewed pretty much anywhere in the world. This is a popular example of “store and forward” telemedicine.
“Take two aspirins and call me in the morning” is the classic joke about a phone conversation with a doctor. However, increasingly interactive telemedicine services are being used. What is driving it? The rising incidents of chronic diseases such as diabetes and heart disease, along with a shortage in doctors, particularly in rural areas and within certain medical specialties.
Finally, telemedicine is critical for the remote monitoring of patients, either in a chronic or emergency situations. Access to real-time data from remote devices and expanding patient health data records is providing the potential for significant improvements in cost and effectiveness of medical treatment. Interestingly, one is starting to see large projects for mobile health clinics that combine these features, particularly in places with large rural populations like China.
A Huge Market with Huge Technical Challenges
According to a 2009 report from Pike and Fischer, the market for telemedicine devices and services will be nearly $3.6 billion by 2014. However, there are large technological challenges with building out the devices and telecommunications infrastructure to support the growth. This lies in two areas: the telecommunications infrastructure to enable the vast amounts of data transfers between various sites and the sophistication of the monitoring and communications devices used by the patients and doctors.
Spansion is heavily involved in the build-out of next generation telecommunications infrastructures. High reliability code and data storage is required for next-generation communications systems. Spansion GL NOR Flash memory, with its wide density range, is perfectly suited for this advanced networking gear and helps ensure systems are up and running so doctors get quick access to the data.
Similarly, Spansion Flash plays a critical role in the design of effective monitoring devices. These Wearable Wireless Body Area Networks provide the sensors and communications to monitor the health and conditions of the patient with chronic diseases like diabetes, heart disease and asthma. In addition to being “fashionably wearable,” these devices need to have reliable, secure communications with very high fidelity of data and time monitoring. They also need to interoperate smoothly with the Internet communications and be very energy efficient. Designing these embedded systems is not a trivial task and requires sophisticated software and storage capabilities on board the device.
We are only seeing the start of telemedicine. There are many avenues of growth, including telepharmacy, telesurgery, telerehabilitation, telenursing, etc. Spansion’s Flash Memory solutions are positioned well to provide the onboard storage needed to achieve the full potential of these solutions.
“New Technologies in Spain” is a multi-part series highlighting Spanish innovation and is produced by Technology Review’s custom-publishing division in partnership with the Trade Commission of Spain. Their article on E-Health – http://www.technologyreview.com/microsites/spain/ehealth/ – surveys the E-Health ecosystem in Spain, highlighting an impressive list of innovators, some of whom I’ve worked with in the past. The section on Telemedicine highlights the space-age technologies brought to bear by partnerships with NASA and the European Space Agency. Interestingly, the return on investment for Telemedicine is highest when the best technology is deployed to regions with the lowest levels of established health care infrastructure. In these cases it is likely to be cheaper to deploy the best Telemedicine technology than to build and staff a new hospital. For example GMV, one of the profiled companies, has set up a telemedicine-based hospital in a soccer stadium in Columbia that is networked to five established hospitals. This approach is attractive and effective enough that GMV is planning deployments in Latin America and Africa. I can imagine that Telemedicine may be heralded at some point on Hans Rosling’s animated bubble charts showing “lifetime vs income over time” (see Hans Rosling’s 200 Countries, 200 Years, 4 Minutes) as one of the key factors that enable life spans in the developing world to catch up with the long life spans enjoyed by the healthy and wealthy developed world.