Telehealth refers to the use of digital communication technologies for delivering and facilitating health-related services. The latter include medical care, health information services, both provider and patient education as well as self-care. Telemedicine has evolved into becoming an encapsulating broader array of services and activities of the digital health and is overcoming barriers that had posed by the distance between the patient and the healthcare provider (Pande, 019). Telemedicine is useful in providing access to medically underserved populations by speeding access to care.
While the distance between the caregiver and patient can limit access to care, this technology is overcoming the geographical distances and also impacting the rural geographical areas where there is a clinician shortage. The quality of care has also been improved by telemedicine and telehealth. These include patients who have mental and medical conditions. On top of increasing efficiency in the way care is delivered, it is offered at a reduced cost. Firstly, the transport cost of moving from one place to another is eliminated and patients can even be kept out of the hospital since the behavioral health intervention is delivered remotely (Pande RL, 2019).
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Examples of remote patient monitoring (RPM) include medical devices held by hand to online platforms allowing for inputting of patients data. They could be blood pressure or heart rate monitors, diabetic patients’ glucose meters, remote infertility monitoring, and logging programs for monitoring caloric intake. RPM allows the completion of own basic health testing and this makes health care professionals attend to more patients. Most importantly, it reduces costs because patients consolidate health data and pass it to healthcare professionals virtually, by use of computer software applications installed on either the computer on other devices (Baldo et al, 2018). Further, it increases patients’ access to care because it is a holistic process allowing the patient to connect with the clinician but also the extended team. The feedback regarding personal conditions trickles in daily educating the patients and also offering them support.
References
Bertoncello, C., Colucci, M., Baldovin, T., Buja, A., & Baldo, V. (2018). How does it work? Factors involvedin telemedicine home-interventions effectiveness: A review of
reviews. Plos One , 13 (11), e0207332. https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0207332
Pande RL, e. (2019). Leveraging remote behavioral health interventions to improve medical
outcomes and reduce costs. - PubMed - NCBI. Retrieved from https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/26065105
Telehealth Use in Rural Healthcare Introduction - Rural Health Information Hub. (2019).
Retrieved from https://www.ruralhealthinfo.org/topics/telehealth
