Telemedicine
Develop innovation and market access for your solutions in the Virtual Care market
Our specialized team supports healthcare players in their projects related to Virtual Care, particularly telemedicine, which has grown significantly in practice since the Covid-19 pandemic.
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The challenges related to telemedicine and virtual care
More and more telemedicine offers are available and cover a range of services intended for both patients and healthcare providers, from online appointment booking, calendar management, teleadvice, teleconsultation, e-prescription, and even the e-delivery of medicines.
Telemedicine addresses two main objectives. The first, driven by teleconsultation and tele-expertise, aims to allow isolated or dependent people to have access to a traditional consultation or to benefit from the opinion of a specialist, remotely. The second, driven particularly by remote monitoring, aims to improve the care pathway and relieve hospital overcrowding by enabling early detection of clinical signs synonymous with hospitalization or re-hospitalization.
Although telemedicine has been increasingly adopted by certain patient populations since the Covid-19 pandemic, its development into routine practice is still in its infancy and faces many organizational (cost and reimbursement, legal liability, privacy protection, data security), human (in particular the willingness of patients or medical staff to use these services) and technical (qualification of medical staff, interoperability of systems, data rate communication, etc.) challenges.
In this context, there are many challenges for healthcare actors to get these new practices off the ground, including:
The definition of virtual care and telemedicine in the technical or regulatory sense may vary according to the stakeholders concerned or the countries investigated. It is then difficult but necessary to understand the practical variations in each context, the level of proof expected by the healthcare authorities or even the regulatory dimensions necessary for their approval.
What are the current telemedicine practices in a given geographical area? What are the expected developments in this market? What are the applicable regulations?
As with many digital developments, education is a key element in facilitating the adoption of telemedicine. This educational approach must involve both key interlocutors of the teleconsultation: doctors must be supported, encouraged and trained and patients must be informed of the presence of, for example, teleconsultation in their care pathway.
How to work with communities of doctors to promote the use of telemedicine? How to address this change in culture among medical staff, especially older doctors, and patients? How to optimize a care pathway using virtual care tools?
When we compare the maps of medical deserts and digital deserts, we often see that they overlap. The populations most in need of access to care are also the most disadvantaged in terms of telecommunications. Also, the most demanding acts in terms of throughput, such as sending medical images for example, can be limited, either because the throughput is too low, or because it is unreliable (only one operator, frequent power cuts…). Telemedicine is thus generally hampered by poor network coverage.
What role can healthcare industrial players play to promote the connectivity of medical deserts? Are space telecommunications the solution to this problem of terrestrial telecommunications?
Telemedicine acts entail the intervention of several actors (supplier of the technical solution, medical staff in town or at the hospital, insurers, local or national healthcare organizations, etc.) and therefore often require coordination or the establishment of partnerships between all the actors on financing models and the remuneration of each.
How to align healthcare providers, insurers, employers, clinics, hospitals, public authorities, solution providers, to promote the acceleration of telemedicine? What partnership model should be put in place? What business models to develop?
Another major challenge is the management and use of data gathered over the course of patient pathways. Large amounts of data from patient files are gathered by various stakeholders regarding patients and the evolution of their diseases (age at diagnosis, type of screening, side effects, disease progression, etc.) and could provide for cross-analyses aimed at innovating and improving care pathways.
Today, well beyond ethical debates, a large amount of data is underused and remains compartmentalized. In France, for example, initiatives such as the Health Data Hub – a platform for centralizing data from various organizations – has emerged and paves the way for new projects with varied perspectives: fundamental research, drug development, monitoring of their real-life uses, and optimization of care pathways (prevention, hospital care management and patient monitoring).
What is the current regulatory framework? What data can be shared between those involved throughout the care pathway? How is this data collected and used to improve care pathways?
Alcimed has been supporting its clients for many years in their projects related to telemedicine and virtual care. We work in particular with pharmaceutical leaders, medical device manufacturers, public institutions (ARS, SATT, etc.) as well as with virtual care pure players, start-ups and innovative SMEs.
The diversity of our clients, the geographic fields we explore, and the types of projects we develop give us a global and in-depth understanding of the challenges related to telemedicine.
Our projects cover topics as diverse as:
- Exploring new technologies,
- Studying regulatory frameworks,
- Searching for partners,
- Analyzing and optimizing patient pathways,
- Analyzing the evolution of medical practices and the receptivity of healthcare providers,
- Defining market access strategies,
- Developing value proposition,
- Evaluating business cases demonstrating the value generated for our clients and the actors with whom they interact.