VA has many opportunities for expanded sharing of telemedicine initiatives with Federal and non-Federal partners. There are a great number of other telemedical applications where centralized reading and interpretation of clinical results could benefit remote clinics or medical center consortiums that are being formed to meet the medical needs of today. VA's transmission of prescriptions to a centralized location for remote processing, called Central Mail-Out Pharmacy, will result in economies of scale and streamlined service to the patient. Telemedicine implementation costs are quite variable, and highly dependent on the complexity and volume of usage. We believe that the benefits telemedicine offers will far outweigh the costs when the right technologies are matched to the right needs.
Several obstacles remain to the further use of telemedicine today.
In order to fully realize the benefits of telemedicine, standards for connecting different systems must be developed and used. Without standards and a directed effort to create a common network for telemedicine, hospitals will divide into small groups that can teleconsult with each other but not with those outside their group. This would represent a tremendous loss for U.S. medicine, as each group would be dependent on the vendor of their non-standard system and patients would not benefit from the wider availability of specialists and competition in the marketplace. There is also a need for greater partnering between VA and private industry. Reducing the complexity of contracting out and establishing a private-Federal partnership would allow us to work together with industry in pursuit of standards and solutions to these highly technical problems.