Description of Session
In a world where 400M people have no access to healthcare and 2B have poor access (unaffordable, distant), telemedicine is seen by many as one of the most promising routes to close these gaps and speed universal health coverage. Indeed, experience in many low-resource settings has shown that digital technologies can disproportionately help improve prevention, diagnosis, treatment and follow-up of patients. Telemedicine in particular is credited with reducing the cost and burden of travel to clinics for care, increasing access to doctors and improving patient outcomes. Among the more innovative evolutions of telemedicine for LMIC settings are small portable units, simple enough for frontline health workers to operate, that perform nearly all WHO essential diagnostics, while automatically digitizing and transmitting results so a remotely located doctor can interpret test results while meeting patient and HW via low bandwidth video consultation. By moving care to patients instead of the other way around, telemedicine contributes to a shift in the balance of power from the traditional vendors (doctors) to a new model where services are made more accessible and more flexible depending on the consumer's needs. Can telemedicine can find viable price points and workable business models? Is telemedicine a true disrupter, able to dramatically transform healthcare access for poor and remote populations? Or has the global health community pinned too many hopes on these promising technologies?
