Transcript

Mr. Sesno:  I’d like to ask you this. We talk a lot about disparities in health care delivery. Rural--people who live in rural areas may have many, many miles between them and their doctor or hospital or whatever. Thinking of rural America, thinking of inner-city America, what kind of prospects does this sort of technology offer?

Dr. Meyer:  You know, I think you really hit on one of the big issues, and I think that is whether or not the digital divide, which plays out in many sectors of our life, is gonna play out writ large in health care. And I think that it also has the opportunity, though, to change that. So for example, my parents live in a very rural area of upstate New York along the Vermont border. and the ability to go to a facility near them and if need be, to do a telemedicine consult with a specialist in Boston is something that’s very real now. And so in some ways, we’ve been able to use this information technology to kind of cross some of those bridges much faster than we otherwise would. And one can think of the way that we’ve had telecommunications evolve. many parts of America waited for years to have phone lines to be strung through their areas. But now with digital technology and with wireless, we can get to them quicker. We need to do the same kind of thing with health care.