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10th annual meeting of the American Telemedicine Association

The American Telemedicine Association (ATA) held its 10th annual meeting and exposition in Denver, Colorado, on 17–20 April 2005. Attendance was the highest ever, with over 2000 registered attendees from 43 countries (a 22% increase from the previous conference in 2004). The exhibitor hall was sold out, with nearly 120 companies represented. Prior to the official opening, there were a number of special meetings as well as a series of day and half-day education courses on topics ranging from Telemedicine 101 (i.e. the basics of setting up a telehealth practice) to Telehealth Evaluation. There were over 200 oral and over 100 poster presentations. This year’s presentation sessions were organized into five topical tracks: Home Telehealth and Remote Monitoring, Business and Finance, Health Information Technology (IT) and Telecommunications, Federal and State Programmes, and Telemedicine Success Stories. As usual, the exhibitor with the most impressive array of futuristic tools, robots (see Figure 1) and devices for telemedicine was the Telemedicine and Advanced Technologies Research Center (TATRC) of the United States Medical Research and Materiel Command. Although many of these devices may seem suitable only for military use (such as a robotic system for retrieving injured soldiers from the battlefield while transmitting vital information to a field medic), they may have more widespread application in disaster relief. On the rest of the exhibition floor, two trends were evident in terms of where the field of telemedicine is headed. The first was that the number of companies with home telehealth products was much higher than in previous years, pointing to telemedicine’s increasing stake in the home health market. The second trend was an increase in the number of devices aimed at patients’ selfmonitoring, collecting data both for transmitting to a clinical hub site as well as to their own computer for self-maintenance records. The prominent roles of the patient and home health were evident throughout the meeting. The keynote speaker was Holly Atkinson, the President of Village Health and the medical correspondent for a number of television programmes. Her talk, ‘The Telemedicine Consumer Perspective’, highlighted a number of important consumer trends that are likely to affect not only the future of telemedicine but also medicine in general. One important trend affecting the entire world is that people, especially women, are living longer. As people live longer, the burden on the world’s health-care systems is increasing dramatically, as is the burden on family carers. The lack of physicians and other health-care workers in geriatric medicine presents an opportunity for telemedicine. Health monitoring tools that can be used in the home by elderly patients and their carers will become much more widely employed than has been common in the past few years. The benefits are already known – monitoring of vital health signs by the patient and telemonitoring of signs by their clinicians results in fewer acute events, fewer visits to the hospital, fewer visits required by home nurses and better psychological status of the patient in terms of feelings of empowerment and general wellbeing. A second important trend is the level of technology awareness and use among the younger generations (i.e. those after the postwar ‘baby boomer’ generation) around the world. Mobile phones are widely used in nearly all countries, and represent an increasingly common mode of communication. Beyond their use as a simple telephone, however, is a growing range of technological feats that mobile phones can perform. This is allied to the ease with which the generations being brought up with the mobile phone as their main communication tool can use these added features. Text messaging, photo acquisition and transmission, Internet connectivity, video recording and nearly any computer function you can imagine are all available on mobile phones today. A quick search of the literature in telemedicine reveals at least 25 studies in the past two years on various telemedicine applications