When mHealth And Telehealth Become 'Just Healthcare'

Eric Wicklund | Government Health IT | July 25, 2013

mHealth and telehealth: Two popular terms in the healthcare lexicon these days. And two whose days are numbered.

That's what Jonah J. Czerwinski thinks. As the senior advisor to the Secretary of the U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs, he leads the VA Center for Innovation, which has seen a wide range of mHealth and telehealth projects introduced these past few years. Speaking Wednesday during the first day of the World Congress on mHealth and Telehealth in Boston, he pointed out that the VA helped roughly 500,000 veterans receive healthcare services through telehealth in 2012, and expects to help more than 600,000 this year with services that span some 44 clinical specialties.

But Czerwinski says this isn't mHealth or telehealth – just the standard of healthcare that the VA expects to use for all of the 23 million American serviceman and women, active and retired.