Center for Health Care and Policy Research (CHCPR)
The Center's mission is to create and disseminate new scientific knowledge that will help private and public decision-makers to develop cost-effective services and programs that improve people's health.
Featured Research: The Doctor is Always Home
Telemedicine offers patients the ability to communicate with their doctors without ever leaving their home. Despite the obvious benefits for rural and housebound individuals, both patients and physicians have been slow to accept this new way of practicing medicine. For many physicians, there has simply not been enough evidence that telemedicine is effective. Assistant Professor Jami DelliFraine and Associate Professor Kathryn Dansky, both of health policy and administration, recently presented a comprehensive analysis of Telemedicine clinical studies at the British Royal Society of Medicine Telehealth and E-Health meeting in London and say that telemedicine does work.
Says DelliFraine, "Though there are a large number of studies of telemedicine, those studies have been so diverse that the overall efficacy of telemedicine remained unclear. The research has been in different settings, using different measures of effectiveness and showing conflicting results." DelliFraine and Dansky attempt to provide a useful and comprehensive synthesis of the research. They reviewed over 145 health sciences articles evaluating telemedicine, 49 of which provided statistically sound assessments of the clinical effectiveness. Their analysis of the overall picture? The studies do suggest that telemedicine works--particularly for chronic conditions that require constant monitoring.