mHealth and telehealth: Two popular terms in the healthcare lexicon these days. And two whose days are numbered.
That’s what Jonah J. Czerwinski thinks. As the senior advisor to the Secretary of the U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs, he leads the VA Center for Innovation, which has seen a wide range of mHealth and telehealth projects introduced these past few years. Speaking Wednesday during the first day of the World Congress on mHealth and Telehealth in Boston, he pointed out that the VA helped roughly 500,000 veterans receive healthcare services through telehealth in 2012, and expects to help more than 600,000 this year with services that span some 44 clinical specialties.
But Czerwinski says this isn’t mHealth or telehealth – just the standard of healthcare that the VA expects to use for all of the 23 million American serviceman and women, active and retired.
“It’s connected healthcare – no ‘tele-,’ no ‘m-,'” he told an audience of roughly 100 healthcare experts. “This is just healthcare.”
“Just healthcare” could be the theme of the three-day event, which brings together the 5th Annual mHealth World Congress and 2nd Annual Telehealth Congress under one roof and one agenda. No longer are they specialties in the healthcare landscape, said the conference’s hosts and presenters – they’ve taken over the landscape.
Date: July 25, 2013