Peace of mind. Time. Money.

Telemedicine promises all three. Its aim is to help family caregivers help their loved ones off-site. That aid can be a retirement security lifeline, since, as it happens, many people are having to leave work or cut back on their hours to take care of elderly or incapacitated loved ones. They have no choice.

Whether it’s a web-connected pill bottle that can let a daughter know at her desk if mom has taken her medicine or a Skype doctor visit showing that a wound has healed (and keeping a son from spending hours accompanying dad to a clinic), tele-health technology can be one of the most helpful “co-workers” a job-bound family caregiver can have.

Forfeiting Work And Wages

Family caregivers frequently forfeit hundreds of thousands of dollars in wages, pensions, health insurance and Social Security benefits by quitting or reducing hours on their jobs to help incapacitated loved ones. Thus, the potential for telemedicine to bolster their retirement security is real.

A joint study by the National Alliance for Caregiving and AARP two years ago found that 45 percent of the self-employed gave up work entirely, chose early retirement, reduced work hours or took a less-demanding job when they became family caregivers.

For those working for an employer, the figure was 29 percent.

With rising co-pays, an unabating wallet-eating trend, the savings that telemedicine offers, even for a single visit, is considerable.

The estimates are that emergency visits cost an average of $700 and physician’s office visits cost $150.

A telemedicine session, by contrast, is a fraction of the cost at $40, according to the National Business Group on Health.

Three years ago, the consulting firm of Towers Watson predicted telemedicine had the potential to save employers $6 billion a year—just from direct health-care costs for workers.

The impact of caregiving on people’s retirement security is exacerbated because many caregivers who leave work or cut back on their day jobs don’t recognize the long-term financial harm it causes, said Gail Hunt, the chief executive of the National Alliance for Caregiving.

However, she says, some seniors feel that adult children who use off-site telemedicine are at least partially abandoning them. They also don’t sense the benefit, even if telemedicine is keeping them out of physician waiting rooms.

The equipment and services of this industry are focused on convenience. A variety of services, at shrinking prices, have come on the market.

Apps and in-home, wearable sensors can tell off-site family caregivers, a doctor’s office or a home-monitoring company if a senior or disabled child has fallen, been in bed too long or gained or lost an unhealthy amount of weight quickly. The technology can also detect whether mom or dad is opening the refrigerator enough and thus eating properly, a part of chronic disease monitoring and management.

One of the hopes behind this is to keep family caregivers at work. The challenges to this so far are more legal than technological.

“At this point, we are far from achieving the goal,” said Elaine Ryan, the vice president of state advocacy and strategy integration at AARP.

That’s because many states require patients to come into the hospital before they get tele-health services; they must actually be touched by a nurse at a doctor’s office before the technology can be used for routine medical procedures.

Half the states don’t allow advanced practice nurses to perform telemedicine across state lines, and nearly two out of three don’t allow doctors to.

AARP, however, is lobbying to get all 50 states to make telemedicine a reality.

Insurance

Insurance reimbursement for telemedicine is a mixed bag.

Along with 31 states, the District of Columbia mandates that private insurers cover tele-health the same way they cover in-person services, according to the American Telemedicine Association.

Medicare pays for 89 telemedicine services, including diabetes self-management, radiology, pathology and some cardiology. In some instances, Medicare Advantage plans tend to be generous in telemedicine reimbursements, according to the association.

Almost all Medicaid patients can get some telemedicine services covered, but the list of the services varies state by state.

Smart Homes

At the University of Virginia Health System, telemedicine eliminates the need for nearly 1.5 million miles of travel by patients annually and has cut missed appointments by 30 percent.

Many visits that used to require family members to travel four to seven hours each way are things of the past.

Ruth Drew, the director of family and information services at the Alzheimer’s Association, said looking into the future she can easily imagine the day when “smart homes” make telemedicine a no-brainer.

As the costs go down and ease of use of the devices goes up, they might become ubiquitous among late boomers.

In the end, the biggest job-saving virtue of telemedicine may be that it can provide the peace of mind needed by caregivers to focus on work.

Telemonitoring allows family members to be actively engaged with the care of loved ones and to share information with doctors without being there constantly, says Dr. Archelle Georgiou, author of Healthcare Choices: 5 Steps to Getting the Medical Care You Want and Need.

She recalls adult children in southern Minnesota who had a mother who lived in the same town; she was in her early 90s.

Because the children installed equipment that allowed them to find out whether she had fallen, opened the refrigerator to eat or gone to the bathroom, they were able to care for her 24/7 without having to stop by every day.

With 90 percent of large employers planning to offer telemedicine services to their workers this year, the value and cost savings of the technology have become attractive to corporate executives.

They very well might be using it to aid ailing parents and children, while at the same time eliminating caregiving distractions that could get in the way of their business responsibilities.

“Technology is incredibly important in helping support employees who are also caring for a loved one with an age-related chronic condition,” said Drew Holzapfel, who helped develop a coalition of 40 companies supporting employee caregiving called ReACT (it stands for “Respect A Caregivers Time.”) “Use of telemedicine can allow employee caregivers to better meet their personal and professional demands.”