In a hypothetical situation, what key determinants would one use to decide whether or not a geographic area was an ideal location to offer telehealth services? I would imagine factors like internet connectivity, distance from nearest healthcare facility, Health Professional Shortage Areas (HPSAs), and utilization patterns would all play a role.
What are other potential factors?
Hello, my name is Erik and as a Senior Analyst Programmer in marketing I had the opportunity to build targeted leads list for sales agent, witch is quite similar to your goal with this question.
You are on good track with your suggestion of using multiple models to determine your "customers" potentials by areas, internet availability, etc. We can also think of people age, specific area's health problems, etc. There's multiple trends we could find by managing all the information in a structured database. If you are interested to develop this idea combined with data mining/analysis skills, I will be happy to help you.
I look foward to help you on a call and don't hesitate to send me a message if you have questions.
Regards,
Erik
I think internet connectivity should be addressed further. It can be still quite profitable to install temporary internet stations especially in locations where internet availability is limited. Sometimes it requires very little work to bring internet capabilities to a region. Text-based or telephone based telemedicine is very low in bandwidth.
Distance could be a factor but volume and quality of care are even bigger factors. Focusing more on areas where there is slightly more resources available in the population but minimal infrastructure. This limits the access that patients have to certain facilities and because of lack of competition poor care is provided without much recourse on the patients' side.
I would look at both factors, how much patient need there is and whether the providers there have access to specialists. There are many different ways of bringing telemedicine to a locale. Sometimes clinicians need it more than patients.
Dr. Mo
The factors you mentioned are all key considerations. Utilization patterns are key and a lot of the data is publicly available. For telemedicine you want to look at utilization for appropriate/similar services. Other things to think about are transportation availability, access and availability (look at public CAHPS scores), and drive time analysis. I would focus your investigation on the non-medicaid, non-medicare population.
