Sustaining and Expanding Telehealth: A Survey of Business Models from Selected Prominent U.S. Telehealth Centers.

INTRODUCTION: Telehealth centers across the country, including our own center, are addressing sustainability and best practice business models. We undertook this survey to explore the business models being used at other established telehealth centers. In the literature on telehealth and sustainability, there is a paucity of comparative studies as to how successful telehealth centers function. METHODS: In this study, we compared the business models of 10 successful telehealth centers. We conducted the study by interviewing key individuals at the centers, either through teleconference or telephone. RESULTS: We found that there are five general approaches to sustaining a telehealth center: grants, telehealth network membership fees, income from providing clinical services, per encounter charges, and operating as a cost center. We also found that most centers use more than one approach. CONCLUSION: We concluded that, although the first four approaches can contribute to the success of a center, telehealth centers are and should remain cost centers for their respective institutions.

Center forTelehealth and Cybermedicine Research, University of New Mexico Health Sciences Center: a model of a telehealth program within an academic medical center.

An overview of the Center for Telehealth and Cybermedicine Research at the University of New Mexico Health Sciences Center was presented along with several other national and international programs as part of the of a symposium-workshop on telehealth, "Sustaining and Realizing the Promise of Telemedicine," held at the University of Michigan Health System in Ann Arbor, MI, May 18-19, 2012 and hosted by the University of Michigan Telemedicine Resource Center and its Director, Rashid Bashshur. This article describes our Center, its business plan, and a view to the future.

Telehealth in the trenches: reporting back from the frontlines in rural America.

Access to appropriate healthcare services continues to be a major challenge in rural America. Telehealth technologies offer an opportunity to bridge gaps in health services in rural and remote areas and possibly support rural economic development. Lack of access to healthcare services to a growing population may create barriers to recruitment of businesses and economic growth. Several rural-oriented programs have attempted to leverage these emerging distance technologies, but success has varied despite the application of considerable federal, state governmental, and private resources. Barriers to adoption and sustainability of rural telehealth embody several factors that must be considered when planning, developing, implementing, and evaluating a rural telehealth program. New Mexico, the fifth largest state in the United States, represents many of the issues related to the potential benefits and challenges in developing a telehealth system to serve its rural communities. The Center for Telehealth at the University of New Mexico Health Sciences Center has been supported in large part by state and federal funding. Through our experiences, successes, failures, and lessons learned, we have developed approaches to overcoming barriers to adoption and sustainment of telehealth applications, including the establishment of partnerships with economic development projects in the state. This article describes these experiences and identifies and provides strategies for planning, development, implementation, and sustainment of telehealth in a rural program.