Clinical encounters costing for telemedicine services

The Arizona Telemedicine Program (ATP) has developed a costing model that includes a number of factors contributing to the cost of providing services via telemedicine and generates a per-encounter cost. We first developed the model in 1999 and in this paper used it to analyze clinical services for the fiscal year 2000/2001. We evaluated the calculated weighted cost for providing those services via telemedicine as compared to the cost of providing those services "face-to-face." The cost of providing services via telemedicine was found to be lower when a patient had to travel 127.5 miles or more to receive clinical services. Our study provides analysis of the factors, their contribution to costs, as well as some factors, which are pertinent, but are more problematic to calculate. In this paper, we discuss the relevance of these results as they relate to telemedicine programs and a possible means to reduce costs even further.