Scaling telehealth programs: lessons from early adopters

The Commonwealth Fund, a foundation that supports health care research and makes grants to support practices and policy, has just published a compilation of three telehealth case studies from the Veterans Health Administration (VHA), Partners HealthCare/Center for Connected Health and Centura Health at Home dating back to 2004. These concentrated on reducing preventable rehospitalizations and used various aspects of telehealth/remote patient monitoring (RPM). The VHA’s was the most comprehensive (with best results in depression and mental health), Partners focused on cardiac and Centura on congestive heart failure, pulmonary and diabetes. While Commonwealth’s main point is the lessons to be learned (disruption of the status quo, the changes in processes and the time to scale), this early data is interestingly not well known–and should be. Overview, compilation PDF (note the overview has links to the full individual case studies)