History
Connected health has its roots in telemedicine, and its more recent relative, telehealth. The first telemedicine programs were primarily undertaken to address healthcare access and/or provider shortages. Connected health is distinguished from telemedicine by:
- A broader concern for healthcare cost, quality and efficiency, particularly as related to the chronically ill
- Concomitant interests in making healthcare more patient centric by promoting healthcare consumerism through education, and patient feedback
- Efforts in the direction of integrating of data generated outside of traditional healthcare settings such as the home with centralised, often electronic patient record
One of the first telemedicine clinics was founded by Dr. Kenneth Bird at Massachusetts General Hospital in 1967. The clinic addressed the fundamental problems of delivering occupational and emergency health services to employees and travellers at Boston's Logan International Airport, located three congested miles from the hospital. Over 1,000 patients are documented as having received remote treatment from doctors at MGH using the clinic's two-way audiovisual microwave circuit. The timing of Dr. Bird's clinic more or less coincided with NASA's foray into telemedicine through the use of physiologic monitors for astronauts. Other pioneering programs in telemedicine were designed to deliver healthcare services to people in rural settings.
Read more about this topic: Connected Health
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