Telstra tackles digital home health
Australia’s largest telco is targeting the health sector, aiming to become the nation’s largest eHealth provider.
Telstra Health – Telstra’s venture into digital health solutions – has its eyes set on becoming the country’s largest telehealth provider, increasing its annual revenue from $40 million to $1 billion within five years.
It plans to do this by building the nation’s first integrated health system and has reportedly to date spent more than $130 million on acquisitions and joint ventures in pharmacy software providers and telehealth services.
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According to the most recently released national research, in 2009/10, the country spent $121.4 billion on healthcare, up from $72.2 billion a decade earlier. According to a whitepaper from Telstra titled Towards A Clever Australia, this represented 9.4% of total spending on all goods and services and was an increase from 7.9% a decade earlier.
Between 1997 and 2007, the average Australian has increased the amount they spend on health services by 45%, to reach $4,507 per person.
There’s no question that it’s a booming market.
According to the whitepaper:
“Australians also enjoy one of the highest life expectancies in the world. The average male lives for 79.5 years while the average female will live to age 84. Much of this is attributable to the high standard of available healthcare.
“Australia’s pharmaceutical sector is also healthy. In 2011, it ranked as 15th largest in the world and generated revenues of approximately $22 billion. A strong research and development culture will ensure it remains vibrant and productive in coming years.
“Yet, despite these encouraging indicators, there remains work to be done. As the country’s population ages, demands on the healthcare system will continue to grow. With funding remaining constrained, the only alternative is to increase the efficiency and productivity of existing assets.
“The pressures are already becoming evident. Among older Australians living in the community in 2009, almost half (49%) aged between 65 and 74 years had five or more long-term medical conditions. This figure increased to 70% of those aged 85 years or older.
“The lack of sufficient resources in regional and remote areas of the nation is also a constant challenge. Because of Australia’s vast distances and dispersed population, the availability of on-the-ground healthcare facilities will always be an issue.
“While solutions such as telehealth can assist with this challenge, there is still resistance among some healthcare provider organisations to fully embrace such tools.
“Encouragingly, health facilities around the country are investing large amounts in improving their underlying technology infrastructures to support these emerging initiatives. They recognise IT is fundamental to ensuring medical staff can be as productive as possible and provide the very best in patient care.”
Telstra Health has spent the past two years aggressively building its digital health capabilities, positioning itself at the forefront of the market.
Key to its offering is ReadyCare, a telehealth service in which patients can consult directly with GPs over the phone or by video conference 24 hours a day and seven days a week. This service hopes to reduce the estimated 2.2 million visits to hospital emergency departments each year that could have been avoided if after-hour GP consultations are more readily available.
More recently, in April 2015 Telstra Health entered an agreement with Medibank for the purchase of the business assets of Anywhere Healthcare – a specialist telemedicine solution.
Anywhere Healthcare was established by Medibank in 2013 to give people in regional and remote areas of Australia, or people with a physical constraint, access to specialist medical practitioners and allied health professionals over video conference. It boasts a network of over 1,600 GP and aged care referral partners and a panel of 26 specialists who provide services across a range of specialties.
The acquisition means that when combined with ReadyCare, Telstra Health will have the framework to enable it to provide Australians and their referring GPs a full spectrum of care options via telehealth when it is clinically appropriate, from GP care through to specialists and allied health professionals.
“We are keen to build the Anywhere Healthcare service and increase options for GPs, specialists and care providers in providing high quality care to their patients, Telstra Group executive of retail Gordon Ballantyne says.
“It aligns perfectly with our aim to overcome the challenges of distance and availability to help provide greater levels of access to medicine, especially for those in regional and remote areas.
“We recognise the central role of GPs in managing the care of their patients. Anywhere Healthcare provides a patient’s regular GP the option of referring them to a specialist for a video conference, providing more convenient access to specialist care that can otherwise be difficult to reach because of distance or in circumstances such as for patients in nursing homes.”
The announcement of the acquisition came just days after Telstra Health announced it had also acquired UK-based firm Dr Foster, a provider of health analytics.
Dr Foster works with healthcare organisations to achieve sustainable improvements in their performance through better use of data. It uses risk adjusted methodologies to compare the outcomes of individual hospital patients, allowing adjustment for individual factors such as medical history, age or other background factors.
Telstra Health had previously secured the exclusive rights to provide Dr Foster products and services in Australia in December 2013, with agreements now in place with 15 health services in Australia.
To many, the assets and reach of a company like Telstra would seem like a good thing for the advancement and adoption of digital health technologies, but the Australian Medical Association (AMA) disagrees.
AMA president Associate Professor Brian Owler says quality healthcare would be undermined by a “cynical and inappropriate” push by telecommunications giant Telstra into primary care.
The AMA president told the AAP news service that that AMA supported the use of telemedicine, but only where it complemented and supported a strong doctor-patient relationship, and warned that the ReadyCare service was completely at odds with proper models of care.
“We want people to maintain a regular contact with their GP, not just ring someone out of the blue,” he says.
“They can just ring up a number and get a doctor on the other end that they have no knowledge of or relationship with, and get scripts and other treatments prescribed. This is not the sort of vision we have for general practice and primary care.
“This is a really cynical and inappropriate way for Telstra to be engaged in health care. It’s a commercial solution dressed up as a health solution.”
The truth is, as demands on the national healthcare system increase, providers need to find new ways to deliver more within tighter budgets. Medical budgets are simply not keeping up with technical advances.
It may not be the perfect solution, but surely a company with resources like Telstra’s would only be a good thing in making digital home health a reality?
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