I don’t know about you, but as I see it, one of the challenging things about being a telehealth user is adapting to the nuances involved in using different platforms. Even small differences between them can be annoying and even stressful.
For example, having to enter your personal information at different times when logging into different telehealth platforms might seem like no big deal, but when you are in a hurry to get to your clinician after jumping through various pre-meeting hoops with back-office staffers, even little things like this can be taxing.
For that reason, I was interested to read about a new deal in which one telehealth developer has merged their software with a specific make of television. According to a story appearing in Becker’s Hospital Review, senior healthcare platform Independa is equipping each 2021 and 2022 LG television with its telehealth app and health education platform. The platform runs on LG’s webOS.
According to the news item, which originally appeared in The Verge, the Independa is the first telehealth service offered on LG TVs. The interactive interface provided by the program offers 24/7 access to a professional telehealth provider.
Independa CEO Kian Saneii, who is quoted in the Becker’s piece, notes that conducting such video calls could solve problems faced by elderly patients, such as vision challenges. He also points out that by using TVs, patients can show more of themselves to clinicians. “The actual engagement becomes more effective,” Saneii told the publication.
However, it’s not just the elderly who would benefit from using the bigger screen and wide-angle view available with TV-based telehealth capabilities. As someone who takes advantage of telehealth every chance I get — if for no other reason than finding a parking space in a busy outpatient setting can be a pain — I can see where I could benefit from using a more robust tool like a properly equipped television for this exercise.
The question then becomes whether this is something that should be integrated into practical use by hospitals and clinics. After all, while there could be some significant advantages to this model, the healthcare industry has spent huge amounts of money creating a telehealth infrastructure that works on virtually any mobile device as well as desktop computers.
It would doubtless be very expensive and time-consuming for providers to add specialized televisions to the list of devices their IT department supports. It’s also likely that the providers and their staffers would have to make at least some workflow changes to interact with the new television-based interface effectively.
All told, putting television-based telehealth services in place would probably cause so many problems for providers that they’d have to offer it as a one-off rather than a new way of accessing their existing clinical team. Depending on how you look at things, this may undercut its value position almost completely, as it might not be a good idea to create another care silo.
Still, the idea of offering telehealth using the most capable video device consumers are likely to have does make sense. I’m eager to see how much uptake it gets over the next year or two.
