The more I research telehehealth-Telemedicine, the more I feel stronger about my investments in this area. I mean let us be very clear here that Amazon and others would not be looking into this industry if they didn’t believe that it could be the greatest thing since sliced bread.
At this moment there are many different Telehealth services available through many different companies but in the end, the one that will offer the best service will be the one to outlast the others.
I will not be talking about a specific company here as we are looking at the industry, pre, during and post pandemic; what will become of telehealth and will it be important in the future.
To answer this question we should start by looking at medicine, when I was a child, we did not go to hospitals unless it was absolutely necessary and there were very few clinics; we had a doctor that made house visits. On those days a parent would stay home from work and do the housework, cook and take care of other matters in the house as we awaited the doctor to ring the doorbell. I will never forget when I had the chicken pox, the doctor came the next morning to our house and told my mom what it was and what she should do and that we should not leave the house for a few days or if someone needed to do the groceries, a friend could go or whatever…he explained how it was very contagious and low and behold, my sister got it not too much longer and he had to repay us a visit.
This is a great example of quarantine, the nurse had taken all our vitals the day before over the phone and my mom had explained what the bubbles looked like and when the doctor showed up, he was ready and had an idea of what it was even before he came in, he gave me a needle and gave my mom prescription and we were not to leave the house.
Now, imagine if we had Telehealth back then as we do now, the doctor sees you over a screen and gives you prescription, needles of antibiotics back then seemed to be commonplace but we do our most not to abuse prescription as did, with time we have gained more knowledge and use medication in a more efficient manner therefore allowing the flow of prescription drugs to the pharmacy to become an easy transfer of medication.
With Telehealth, doctors do not need to make that house visit, no one except those inside the home and the ones that were subject to the infected person before symptoms had to worry about spreading a virus. The virus is already better contained even from a simple doctors visit over a Telescreen, now add the power of sending a prescription directly to your pharmacy of choice without wasting paper and all you have to do is pick it up. I mean we can pay for it over the net and most pharmacies even deliver, so imagine, nearly zero contagion once the infection is isolated.
Why would any doctor want to risk themselves and others to infection, why would a person with any type of Coronavirus want to put themselves at risk of infecting themselves with (in this case) the chicken pox.
In my mind regular clinics are not really a thing of the past because there is a certain amount of people that will go to them but I do not believe it will be the norm in the future, they will evolve into an full ecosystem, they will become harder to find and online triaging will become the norm.
With the power of satellites interlinking with wearables, the internet of things will meld this powerful industry together, that not only will our steps be calculated but our heart rythm will be assessed, actually wait, that is happening right now, in 2019 a Texas man says his Apple Watch saved him from having a heart attack.
So where are we then in the future of telemedicine as an investor, the future is now!
We are in it, we are in a transformational stage in the medical world and when you are in the forest you can not see the forest, all you see are the trees…but if you take a step away from it all, you can see that the future is playing itself out – right under our noses – and in 20 years newer technology will start taking the place of this one, maybe we will be looking at augmented and virtual reality overtaking simple diagnostics over the Telescreen or maybe a hologram so advanced will have the capability of focusing on a blemish and recreating it to match a repertoire of blemishes and match it without the need of the physical human intervention.
You see when I was a kid, I always saw the future in the future, but the future is always playing itself out in the present, and once the future in your perceived mind reaches the point in which you have envisioned it, it is now the past, and a new future is actually emerging through those that had started to see the future somewhere on your timeline, and if you have not adapted, you will fall behind and realize how quickly the future became to be in the instant in the present and as quickly as it was the present has now become one second of the past; because as we live out our daily lives the future is always a microsecond away, the present a microsecond of living and the past is a microsecond away.
Telehealth has already been playing itself out for years now but it was the technology that was slow and lacking, with Apple Iphones and its creation of Apps (applications), life with computers (this includes Iphones and Itablets) became simpler and now we have competing technologies all using Apps, we can see how some things that may have been complicated became extremely user friendly today; throw in Telehealth and the future starts to become more realized.
Telehealth will replace all unnecessary physical contact, I easily see it replacing all mental health issues, there is no real need in most cases to report at a Psychologist and even a Psychiatrist’s office when the need is only talking to the patient. I even see most hospitals using Telehealth with out and in house patients as long as there is a doctor on staff and nurses…for those outpatients or a person needing to talk, it can easily be done from the comfort of your home and prescription medication once again can easily be sent off to the pharmacy of choice and imagine if someone needs to talk right away, there’s no wait, imagine how many peoples lives you can save.
This could cover a wide range of issues that could occur at work as well, if the company has a room with a Telescreen, the employee could access the doctor and get the proper medical notes immediately and if the Telehealth service has the email of the Human Ressources, the Telehealth service can immediately forward all documents needed and the employee can focus on healing.
We have also looked at parents and children, besides the annual checkup where a doctor may want to see a child in a controlled setting with an appointment, no parent will take their child to a clinic if it is not necessary, this isn’t an area I have to take a long time to focus on because any one with kids knows what it is to get them to a clinic, its logistics 101 and thats if you have one baby, add one or a few more children to that and you have a real serious day, one that even the most competent CEO’s will find extremely challenging and think works a breeze, and in most cases if it would be necessary to see a doctor maybe the hospital should have been the first choice to begin with!
Just like the doctor that would visit you in your home with the “bag” became a way of the past, which then moved us to going to clinics, we will see a shift in clinics moving over for the Tele-doctor and honestly, it is about time.
We have all seen the waste of time it is waiting hours on end sometimes to see a doctor for five minutes always leaving you wonder, “why did it take so long to see me if my time with the doctor took only five minutes and the other three before me took forever”.
The amount of time it takes you to get ready and take get on public transportation or heading into traffic wasting gas and burning fossil fuels, hours of your life, all for five fucking minutes and this is for your own personal visit, forget the ones with the children!
In my opinion, we need this, we need this change, this innovation and the more players the better, the CAGR (compounded Annual Growth Rate) for the Telehealth industry is estimated over 250 billion dollars by 2026, this is a monster of an industry and it is just going to get bigger and bigger and there is a lot of room for many players offering different services and in my opinion, this is what investors should focus on, who will be the one to outlast the others, in my opinion it will be the company that will simplify and offer the most and best service and not only the best but centralized one stop shop service.
Can it be done, absolutely 100% without a doubt, with all the money being saved from having to own a brick and mortar regular clinic, you can run telemedicine and increase your margins drastically and you could invest in a strategic play on centralizing the services that a client-patient may need, from neurologist to an MRI room…
Instead of having all these services scattered around in hospitals or private clinics, you centralize the service under one roof, basically making it a Mega-Clinic.
With the amount of space that will be available in the future since most brick and mortar stores are closing down and going online, these clinics will be given affordable rent rates unless the company straight out buys the complex and fills it with specialists in diverse fields; no one would be going to these clinics for a runny nose or a doctors note or recurring UTI infections, the majority of the work would all be done online, the doctors may refer the patient to go to its OWN clinic to get a yearly physical and to do blood work all in house and receive the results online at a later date, maybe a notification set up will be an option for the Telehealth clinic so that when results are in -or- its time for your yearly -or- new medication is needed; you will get a notification on your phone in that Telehealth company app which is linked to all your devices including your smart watch…it may be possible one day to see a hologram spring out of your watch and listen to the doctor give you your results, I mean Darth Vader would pop out on a small compact holo-projector when talking to other fleet commanders and star wars was created in the 1970’s.
With 5G and the internet of things around the corner, we will see more complex technology being simplified for the layperson, we will be more interconnected without even noticing it as it becomes a way of life, I already use an app to track my steps and what I eat in order to count my calories and if I put on my apple watch it will start tracking my heart rythm and they will cross share information and ill enjoy it because it will allow me to engage in bettering myself, hell, maybe the smart watch will tell us when we eat something if it was good for us or not because it is reading the hearts function after eating and we may release antibodies or stressing the heart from an insulin spike, maybe some things we enjoy has a negative effect on us..all you need to do is look into the book “eating right for your blood type” and you’ll start seeing that this is very possible, here is the link to buy the book, I have read this book many times and it is all based on science and genetic work which started in the early 1980’s.
There is no doubt that the post SARS Coronavrus-19 has opened up a gateway for the telemedicine world to go through it at a speed of the bullet train and not the steam engine, the floodgates are open and there is no going back, all those that believe that we are destined to go to a place not many of us were happy with to begin with is drinking happy juice – out with the old and in with the new – which is an old saying but as we get older we realize that sayings are created based on life experiences.
What we are seeing in todays Telehealth is in its infancy, we have been lucky enough to be involved in the greatest 100 years of human modernization, as investors we have been blessed with many opportunities, from the invention of direct current electricity, the car, the plane, washing machines, dishwashers, bullet trains, to the computer (did you know that “Time Life” in 1982 made The Computer man of the year), nuclear power and finally Coca Cola and Mcdonalds…the list is nearly endless, as emerging technologies opens up to more innovation in genetics mRNA vaccines and genetic splicing, Nuclear fission, new surgical procedures and medical treatments, electric power at the forefront, with desalinization of the ocean for drinkable water…as I said, the list is endless and Telehealth will revolutionize how we care for people and this is only the very beginning, the companies in my opinion will eat up the industry and mergers and acquisitions will become plenty and in the end, the company offering the best customer centralized one stop concierge service will own most of the market share.
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