Another form of anticompetitive state-level protectionism.

The biggest hurdle may be state medical boards. Idaho’s medical licensing board punished a doctor for prescribing an antibiotic over the phone, fining her $10K and forbidding her from providing telemedicine. State laws that restrict telemedicine — for instance, requiring that patients and doctors have established in-person relationships — have drawn lawsuits charging that they illegally restrict competition. Georgia’s state medical board requires a face-to-face encounter before telemedicine can be delivered, while Ohio’s does not.

2020-03-26: Robots could enable a form of telemedicine that would keep humans out of areas of contagion. A small example is Spot:

It’s using a custom mount and enclosure for an iPad or similar-sized screen to be used for video conferencing between doctors and other healthcare workers and their patients.

Another is the 4x speedup for hygiene theater:

It takes human cleaners 1 hour to carefully disinfect the CT scanning room, wiping down the equipment and surfaces. So when the pandemic hit, and the room had to be cleaned after each use, “a machine that used to be able to do 30 scans a day is down to 7.”

Violet can clean the room in just 15 minutes. It uses machine vision powered by Intel’s Movidius AI chips to map and navigate its surrounding environment. Though humans still have to wipe down the “nooks and crannies the robot can’t get to, like behind the door handles.” But by cutting cleaning times down from 1 hour to 15 minutes, the hospital’s capacity for CT scans increases 4x.

2020-04-15: Health care costs can be lowered by reimbursing at the same rates for telemedicine or treatments that are at home, and by paying fees per patient, rather than huge profit margins on elective procedures

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