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The first-ever WIRED Health Conference in New York last week was an ideal forum for spreading the word about the latest innovations in telestroke and teleICU programs. ITH’s Charlie Huiner spoke at the conference, along with Yulun Wang (via RP-VITA) from Santa Barbara.

You may be sick of that overused phrase “thought leader,” but that’s exactly the type of person this conference draws. Most of the attendees could have easily worn badges saying “guru” or “visionary.” So there’s no better place to change the hearts and minds of the world’s healthcare elite.

Yulun and Charlie shared the stage with some notable names like genomics pioneer Craig Venter and Harvard’s Nicholas Christakis. But their mission there was not to bask in the limelight but to amplify the conference theme: using realtime data to drive healthcare decision-making.

InTouch Health’s RP-VITA

The InTouch presentation was something of a coming out party for RP-VITA, showcasing its environmental awareness capabilities. The ITH presenters noted that coordinated care at most hospitals remains elusive, and demonstrated how RP-VITA can help make it a reality.

Each year in the U.S., 100,000 lives are lost due to medical errors and miscommunication. By providing team-based care and easy documentation, RP-VITA can dramatically reduce those errors and missteps.

Conference attendees marveled at how RP-VITA can undock automatically and glide to a bedside on its own – all from a tap on an iPad. (Don’t forget that most of WIRED’s editors like Steven Levy are longtime fans of R2-D2.)

Thanks to the InTouch presentation, the WIRED world has a clearer understanding of how telestroke and teleICU programs can make healthcare decision-making faster, more accurate and less expensive. Click here to see the live stream of the InTouch presentation.

We’ve all seen Clint Eastwood westerns where the sheriff says, “We can’t treat him here…the closest doctor is in Dodge City.”

Without telemedicine, that’s the future we’re all facing. In little more than a year, some 30 million new patients will enter the U.S. healthcare system – the equivalent of every man, woman and child inVenezuela. Meanwhile, the Association of American Medical Colleges (AAMC) predicts that the physician shortage in America will reach 130,000 by 2025.

Legislative caps on residency funding will only worsen the current physician shortage.

One of the main reasons for the shortage is that the federal government has capped its funding for doctor residencies. Because there are so many deficit hawks in Congress now, it’s unlikely that the cap will be increased anytime soon – and efforts at private funding have stalled. You know we’re in trouble when a Congressman named “Price” (Tom Price, R-Ga.) bemoans the price of training physicians, but can’t muster the votes to change things.

Atul Grover, the AAMC’s chief public policy officer, recently said that “we’re going to have to find ways to see more patients with fewer physicians” to handle the increased volume.

And that’s exactly what telemedicine is doing. While politicians dither and medical schools stay in no-growth mode, telemedicine is enabling the doctors we do have to extend their reach. In fact, telemedicine solves one of today’s thorniest problems: the need for doctor relocation. These days, a young doctor can improve the quality of care in rural communities without ever leavingPhiladelphia or San Francisco.

Like a storm blowing through a western town in that Clint Eastwood movie, there’s a perfect storm on the horizon: millions of new patients, not enough doctors. That storm may be strong enough to blow away all remaining barriers to telemedicine.

Some hospitals mistakenly think that you can create a telemedicine program as easily as someone can build a patio by going to Home Depot.

Good luck with that.

These healthcare do-it-yourselfers make two big mistakes from the get-go: they underestimate the complexity of the job and they overestimate what their IT departments can deliver.

For starters, any hospital that tries to jimmy-rig its own telemedicine system is automatically considered a manufacturer by the FDA. In its 2011 MDDS ruling, the FDA made it crystal-clear that devices that perform active patient monitoring are Class II devices requiring far greater regulatory scrutiny. It’s very costly and time-consuming to get FDA clearance – and why on earth would a hospital want to assume that kind of liability exposure?

Secondly, many hospital IT folks think that creating a telemedicine network is as simple as connecting two tin cans. They fail to realize that telemedicine technology is vastly different from videoconferencing. In telemedicine, a hospital must manage outside networks where there’s no on-call IT person. And the endpoints aren’t static, like in a boardroom-to-boardroom video conference.  But that doesn’t stop many overconfident hospital IT people from biting off more than they can chew.

Starting up a telemedicine program is far more complicated than most hospitals ever expect.

When hospitals try do-it-yourself telemedicine, their IT staff often gets so befuddled by technical issues that clinical workflow becomes an afterthought – and the end result is a system that clinicians hate to use.

We’ve all had neighbors who thought they could build a deck or patio worthy of Town & Country magazine – only to wind up with something that looks like a bomb site. That’s why we urge hospitals to avoid the temptation of do-it-yourself telemedicine. Let the pros do it.

When we recently spoke with the ATA’s CEO Jon Linkous, he said there are plenty of unlikely allies helping to champion telemedicine. On the surface, some of these alliances are head-scratchers. But if you reflect for a moment, you’ll see that telemedicine companies share a common cause with these groups:

NOBEL/Women – No, this isn’t a group of prize winners like Madame Curie. The acronym stands for the National Organization of Black Elected Leaders/Women. They come from the ranks of both state and federal government, and they’re passionate about improving the quality of health care in urban communities. Many people assume that telemedicine mainly benefits rural patients, but many inner-city folks are equally underserved. Many NOBEL women are already sold on the benefits of telemedicine, and they know how to get things done in the halls of power.

Trial lawyers – They’re not the most beloved group inAmerica, but they’re quickly helping to establish telemedicine as a standard of care. In Linkous’ view, attorneys’ efforts may ultimately be more fruitful than trying to get laws passed. Several large hospitals have already had to make large out-of-court settlements because attorneys argued that by not offering telemedicine, the facilities didn’t provide the needed level of care to stroke patients.

Hospitals that do national branding – Linkous notes that highly regarded health systems like The Cleveland Clinic and the Mayo Clinic Care Network are promoting their telemedicine programs in national branding campaigns. When prestigious organizations start practicing and promoting telemedicine nationwide, the rest of the healthcare field takes notice.

If you’re a telemedicine crusader, it’s easy to feel like the Lone Ranger sometimes, but take heart.  You have a host of powerful new allies.  Reach out to them, and be grateful for their help.