Meeting Speaker for Monday, April 21, 2014

    Dr. Javeed Siddiqui

TeleMedicine and its Application in Healthcare

Healthcare as an industry is seriously in need of reform.  Regardless of your politics, our country spends 17.8% of GDP on healthcare, and we still have serious issues with a lack of access and quality of care.  The institute of Medicine Report indicated over 100,000 patients die each year due to medication errors in our hospitals.

We are currently in the center of a perfect storm in health care in the United States: unsustainable costs coupled with an increase in chronic disease prevalence, coupled with a decrease access to care.   This is further complicated by historically low patient satisfaction data and an industry that is recalcitrant to change.   Regardless of its merits or shortcomings, the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act have shed light on an issue that we as a society have been reluctant to address.   Now, at a time when we are considering a change in the healthcare industry, we have an opportunity to re-evaluate our healthcare delivery system.   One method of changing the delivery of healthcare is TeleMedicine.

TeleMedicine is a means of providing healthcare over a distance using real time audio-video technologies.   It represents a technology that health care can employ to help meet the demands of access while fundamentally changing the environment of healthcare delivery.

Dr. Javeed Siddiqui is the co-founder and Chief Medical Officer for TeleMed2U.  He has been actively involved in telemedicine and telehealth since 2002 and recognized as a national thought leader in these fields. 

In addition to being an Infectious Diseases physician, Dr. Siddiqui is a recognized medical technologist who has previously held an appointment at the School of Engineering, University of California, Berkeley and served as the Medical Director of one the nation’s top telemedicine programs at the University of California, Davis.

Dr. Siddiqui was the first Medical Director of California’s Institute for Science and Innovation, The Center for Information Technology Research in the Interest of Society [CITRIS].

Dr. Siddiqui has a multi-specialty medical practice that is 100% telemedicine based and he has helped pioneer new efforts in developing and implementing telemedicine services and programs to hospitals and outpatient clinics.   In 2012 the Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality recognized the telemedicine based anti-microbial stewardship program developed by Dr. Siddiqui’s firms for Sonoma Valley Hospital (SVH) as a very important innovative program in health care.