Collaborative Business Development for Telemedicine Deployment

Abstract

Telemedicine is essentially “the use of information and telecommunications technologies to provide and support health care services when distance separates the participants” (Field, 1996). A broader definition by the World Health Organisation (WHO, 1998) covers a range of applications including diagnosis, treatment and prevention of disease and injuries as well as for the continuing education of health care providers. Many product developments have taken place resulting in various medical devices becoming commercially available which may form part of a telemedicine solution. However, the deployment of telemedicine systems is lagging behind the availability of IS (information systems) and medical devices. Thus, there is a need to look outside the traditional product design and development approaches to address the gap between the slow deployment and the available systems and technologies. Given the limited resources of healthcare providers a collaborative approach to business development is likely necessary due to funding limits as well as a lack of staff with the appropriate knowledge and skills. This paper takes a framework previously developed for mobile networking technologies and looks to ascertain its suitability to assist with business development for healthcare providers planning to implement telemedicine systems. The business planning framework for mobile networking technologies previously developed is shown in Figure 1.

The business planning framework outlined in Figure 1 is a generic model which identifies key components by which business proposals can be examined and their potential value (Woodruff, 1997). This is likely to suit business development planning for telemedicine as recent studies have been less focused on the cost-effectiveness of telemedicine solutions and instead consider the broader benefits (Hailey et al, 2004), such as improved access for patients to services that is possible with remote physician-patient interaction.

Various services are possible with the use of telemedicine systems including those identified by the American Telemedicine Association (ATA, 2014). These applications include “live” interactions such as patient consultations via video conferencing which will necessitate suitable ICT (information and communications technology) infrastructure to provide two-way access. The other telemedicine applications tend to be “off line” rather than “live” interactions and hence have less demanding technology requirements, so the telecommunications technology does not need to be so well supported in terms of bandwidth connectivity and performance.

The business planning framework comprises two sides which need to be in alignment. The left-hand side identifies the elements to assess the market potential of potential applications. The right-hand side of the framework identifies the elements to assess the business case of a proposed application such as telemedicine and allows for collaborative business development. This second aspect is particularly important to consider when planning telemedicine deployment as various departments from organisations within healthcare need to be involved.