Who's Going To Amazon Healthcare?
Brad Lindemann, President/CEO

The fledgling field of telemedicine will soon be very big business on a global scale. The world is rapidly moving towards an environment wherein many medical services will be virtually provided via the Internet. This is as certain as it once was that a significant portion of retail goods and services would fly their way through cyberspace and into consumers' hands. In the process, a new genre of retailers was created, led by Jeff Bezos' amazon.com. And now, the international stage is set for someone to "amazon" the healthcare industry. Who might that someone be?

I first became intrigued with the field of telemedicine when our firm was hired by a major hospital to design a patient portal. It quickly became apparent that no matter where we started, we wouldn't be truly finished until the same portal used to do mundane tasks such as appointment scheduling was also used to conduct virtual appointments via the Internet. During the course of this engagement, I happened into a CVS pharmacy with a Minute Clinic staffed by a Nurse Practitioner greeting the only patient she had. This "innovative" approach to primary care seemed very inefficient to me. Despite this, I discovered that CVS has serious expansion plans for their Minute Clinics.

I walked out of the CVS scratching my head that day. There was something wrong with the picture, but I couldn't put my finger on it. Then it hit me. The patient-provider real time-space paradigm was outdated, inefficient and unnecessary. Historically, seeing a doctor has been a pain in the backside because it necessitated patient and provider being in the same place at the same time. The conventional view of telemedicine breaks only half of the paradigm (place), but continues to assume that patient and provider must be connected real-time (albeit virtually) for the provider to render an accurate diagnosis. Why?

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Telemedicine: The Next Big Thing?

"Telecommunication has changed almost every dimension of our lives within one generation. Telemedicine is its application in health care. It's big, it's powerful and it's mostly asleep. With the current state of health care, isn't it time we wake this elephant up?"

Is there a single resource for telemedicine information?

Not really, but this one's pretty darn good. So, click on the home page and open your mouth and say, "Ahhh". You didn't really do that, did you? If you did, please turn your head to the side and cough.

If Green Acres is the place for you...

...you probably should understand what your healthcare options are going to be down on the farm. The Mayo Clinic is making it easier for those who want to get away from it all by providing top-notch care via the Internet. Green Acres, we are there!

"Never go to a doctor whose
office plants have died."

~ Erma Bombeck