After last month’s blog on disasters, particularly induced by the coronavirus (COVID-19), matters have accelerated. As of this writing there were 127,863 confirmed cases of coronavirus infection and 4,718 deaths from it worldwide. The World Health Organization has declared it a pandemic. One of the primary recommendations for surviving the virus — or preventing it from spreading — is to stay at home. One consequence of the widespread publicity about COVID-19 is that major changes are occurring in working conditions.
Foremost among these changes is sudden emphasis on remote working aka teleworking. What decades of imploring employers has failed to do, COVID-19 is making happen. Major employers are having their employees work from home. Universities and school districts are converting to telelearning. Telemedicine is being used to lessen the load on hospital emergency rooms. The years of telling employers that teleworking helps the bottom line, teleworking’s primary carrot, have had some effect. But that effect is nothing compared to the stick provided by COVID-19.
Continue reading Coronavirus: the stick that urges teleworking →
The idea of quickly getting information to/from rural areas has been around for a long time. In 1970, during my rocket scientist days, I gave a briefing to Jim Fletcher, the incoming head of NASA, on the civilian applications of space. One of the scenarios I presented was that of communications satellites used as a method of relaying information to rural areas. In that case it was medical information from the National Library of Medicine to Ethiopia where there was a famine. Primitive telemedicine. There was no rural broadband then.
Continue reading Rural broadband: a telework bottleneck? →
Way back in the distant past, the early 1970s, as I was trying to focus my thoughts on telecommuting, telemedicine kept appearing as one of the options. Assessing the future of telemedicine by testing it was one of my research team’s initial set of possibilities. But the complexities of dealing with the medical establishment — and the fact that we had a very limited research budget — led us to focus on more accessible business operations; the insurance company we used as our first test site.
The basic concept for both telework and telemedicine is the same: Where and how is it possible to use information technology to couple expensive/scarce resources with human needs? In the case of telemedicine the resources — physicians and some health care personnel together with their support equipment and facilities — can be both scarce and expensive. Those in need of the sort of care they provide must often travel great distances to get from home to the facilities, face fees beyond their capacity, or go without. The prospect is daunting!
Continue reading Telemedicine: Its Future Beckons →
A column about telemedicine by Mike Freeman in the Los Angeles Times of 19 March 2016 is headlined “Doctor visits could be like Uber”. The introduction reads:
Though it may sound farfetched, seeing a doctor could move in that direction if telemedicine gains acceptance.
How time flies. On my desk is a report By Ben Park titled: Introduction to Telemedicine: Interactive Television for Delivery of Health Services. The report, from the Alternate Media Center at the School of the Arts, New York University, is dated June 1974. This report appeared just before my research team’s December 1974 report on the Telecommunications-Transportation Tradeoff. The gist of both reports was that information technology can substitute for many travel purposes, when configured properly. The technology of 2016 is far more powerful than that of 1974. Both telework and telemedicine are happening in ever greater variety today.
Continue reading Telemedicine to Uber? →
. . . about telework, energy and the environment
