Telemedicine helps dialysis patients in rural India

Vijay Govindarajan, on the Harvard Business Review site, explains in his piece, "Telemedicine Can Cut Health Care Costs by 90%," how using cell phones and digital cameras, end-stage renal disease patients in India are able to monitor their peritoneal dialysis (PD) effluent. PD patients have to be very vigilant to recognize and respond to any sign of infection in their peritoneum. Having a reliable and simple method to communicate with their physicians, more patients were willing to use PD instead of hemodialysis, which is much more expensive and resource heavy.

Not only was remote monitoring cheaper, "rural patients performed well on PD and had significantly better survival rates than did their urban counterparts."