Andrew Heinzman
Lenovo is diving into telemedicine with Virtual Care, a new service that helps chronically ill patients track their health and make lifestyle changes between doctor visits. Virtual Care comes with health-monitoring tools, a Lenovo tablet, and an AI called Rosie that helps patients understand data and design custom health plans.
The Virtual Care service should help patients with conditions like lung disease, hypertension, and diabetes improve their health and reduce the frequency of doctor visits. But it doesn’t cut your doctor out of the picture. In fact, Virtual Care connects directly with your healthcare provider to make sure that interventions and regimen changes happen before you experience any adverse health effects.
Rosie, the Virtual Care AI, is mostly an education tool. It encourages you to follow daily goals and develop healthy habits. It also keeps an eye on your regular blood pressure or glucose measurements and alerts you when something seems awry.
Lenovo is already involved in health care with its Remote Reading service for radiology, but Virtual Care is the company’s first foray into any sort of telemedicine. According to Lenovo, its Virtual Care service should cost doctors around “$80 per patient per month.” That number could be a bit higher when it trickles down to your medical bill.
