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Thoughts, comments, news and musings on real estate operations, in 500 words or less.

Hand and Hammer

Posted by D. S. Osborn. in Return on Investment on April 25, 2008

Technology provides an increasingly positive and influential impact on patient healthcare and the overall healthcare environment. There is tremendous activity in the healthcare technology marketplace, on both the clinical and environmental sides, and it’s not slowing up as it gets older. Take for example the healthcare information marketplace.   Steve Case, founder of America Online, launched revolutionhealth - www.revolutionhealth.com  a year ago. The new site provides consumer-centered medical information to subscribers who want to track their own health.  Don’t forget Microsoft. It launched “HealthVault” – www.heatlhvault.com – which allows subscribers to store and access family health information. Google Health is developing personal health records for consumers and funded a company that offers DNA scans to customers. These organizations provide consumer-based, clinical health technologies.   Clearly the big boys are interested in the healthcare space.
If you look to the Internet remote monitoring market, you’ll find technologies that impact the health of remote patients. The Federal Communications Commission’s Rural Health Care Pilot is expanding healthcare services to rural and underserved areas by sponsoring “telehealth” networks. A telehealth network is a system of networks that transmit patient health data from one location to another over the Internet or telephone lines. They collect and broadcast health data to centralized locations for review and analysis, helping providers to improve patient health quality and drastically reduce costs associated with patient visits and transportation.   With geography and mobility as barriers to care, telehealth gives healthcare givers far better visibility into the health continuum of their patients.  In a recent report, the potential savings in provider-to-provider telehealth are huge – over $4 billion.
Translate that visibility to remote facilities and you get the same result.   Centralized management of procurement and supply at healthcare organizations have already proven the value of aggregated purchasing power and standardized operations.  Projecting a comprehensive operations management plan and enforcing that plan with real-time visibility over geographically widespread facilities and continuing care retirement communities provides the same value. Consistent and reliable facility and equipment availability are as central to quality patient care as are the delivery of appropriate therapies and drug regimens. Internet-based and wireless operations management programs monitor facility condition and care in real-time and notify facility caregivers (engineers) immediately when a condition changes or the patient (facility) has a health event, is in need of repair or needs on on-going therapy. These systems help managers to both prevent and, in some case, foresee up coming facility health events.  Preventive maintenance and preventive medicine go hand-and-hammer when it comes to modern healthcare. 

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