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.