Statewide Telemedicine Network: A Modern Anachronism

Anachronism (ə-năk’rə-nĭz‘əm) n.

1. The representation of someone as existing or something as happening in other than chronological, proper, or historical order.
2. One that is out of its proper or chronological order, especially a person or practice that belongs to an earlier time:

I continue to read with interest articles describing new telemedicine projects. I just don’t get it.

What are these guys doing? You don’t need a telemedicine network fraught with complicated hookups, poor screen quality, and difficult communication interfaces. The new telemedicine network is called the I-N-T-E-R-N-E-T (invented by Al Gore in 1994) which in case you didn’t know obviates your “telemedicine initiatives”. I mean seriously, who is sponsoring all these things anyway? Oh, it must be the really efficient guys who you want to sponsor your health care.

There are hundreds of services popping up that do this stuff all day long – American Well, TeleDoc, Consult-A-Doc, Myca, etc. The only thing encouraging I saw in this article is that they actually believe they can have a 100 clinics up the first year. That will be great so that the millions of people who have been doing eConferencing via the internet for the last five years can have some medical people to talk to. Cool.

Oh, and by the way, congratulations on the concept of a broadband connection. Maybe you can download some Seinfeld re-runs to celebrate the glory days of 1998.