Despite the continued wrangling over whether utilizing telehealth methods affects standards of care, there is currently a convergence of perfect conditions for the rise of remote health care options. Technological capabilities are rapidly increasing while the cost of high-tech solutions is decreasing, which also affects the adoption rate of electronic medical records and practice management software by providers. The increasing use of application service providers (ASPs) in this field means that physicians can securely access patients’ records from anywhere in the world, and video conferencing options provide a human touch to a remote physician - patient encounter. Added to technological factors, the U.S. is facing a shortage of nurses, leaving some rural areas particularly understaffed; plus high gas prices are prompting many to seek remote alternatives for services or tasks they would usually conduct face to face.

Telehealth solutions are not just limited to linking patients to providers. Some of the most valuable ways to utilize this technology is to provide a link between medics; for example, between hospitals and consulting surgeons who are not on-site, or paramedics and ER doctors. An indication of how mainstream remote health care services are becoming is Aetna and Cigna’s recent decision to offer reimbursement for teleconsults. It seems that geography or an inability to travel may soon no longer be a barrier to receiving the same range of health care services as everyone else.

Most people that have objections to Internet-based software applications usually cite a lack of security as the reason. Particularly when it comes to applications that deal with protected health information (PHI), even some technology-savvy professionals feel safer if they have the server on-site under their control, with data only being transmitted on an internal network.

This feeling of security is, for the most part, illusory. Client servers located in offices or institutions rarely have the same level of security that ASPs are able to afford their servers due to economies of scale. Plus, having your server on-site means that you are responsible for maintaining it. Not only does this require extra resources, but it can be problematic if there’s a disaster – your on-site server is vulnerable to floods, tornadoes and fires in a way that good ASP servers are not, because they are usually situated at several diverse locations with data replicated across them. If a disaster befalls one of them, the other ones are still safe and so is your data.

Additionally, having to make your own data backups provides another opportunity for a security breach, as the University of Utah Hospitals & Clinics found out recently, when the backup tapes with medical billing information for 2.2 million patients went missing from a courier’s car. They could have taken a leaf out of the book of the university’s student health center, which unlike the hospitals and clinics division uses Nuesoft Xpress, an ASP model medical management and billing system, meaning their data remains secure and HIPAA compliant without university staff worrying about maintenance, backups or disasters.