The healthcare industry is constantly evolving from the way procedures are conducted every day from processing to storage, and dissemination of information to a broader patient population. Everybody is scared of change, but in order to survive in a competitive market, it needs to be pursued, stayed relevant, and adapted. This has forced us to reassess how our healthcare industry adapts remotely with the current rules on social distancing.
Telehealth provides access to treatment beyond conventional medical facilities through the use of technology. Since the 1980s, telehealth has existed, but it has evolved and adapted to new technologies. Ever since, telehealth has become widely accessible in the world, with a range of tools and software that can exchange medical data in real-time so that practitioners can deliver care to previously under-served populations. It helps medical professionals to support patients and their families by bringing knowledge from around the world together and improving patient data collection and communication and leads to a more holistic care plan.
Quick Benefits of Telehealth
- Offers patients non-critical care
- Providing services to a larger base of patients in rural or under-serving communities, veterans, critical care, the elderly and in normal or emergency circumstances
- Establish a contact channel to track patient progress easily and efficiently
- Efficient patient information collection and transmission
- Consult specialists all over the world
Expertise to All
The use of medical tools to monitor a patient’s health from a distance offers both patient and provider a new level of comfort. It can supplement in-person visits to a physician and daily visits to a physician to create a more detailed treatment plan. Additional treatment, otherwise inaccessible, may also be given.
This does not mean that the trips to the doctor’s office will not be completely removed. Instead, physical appointments and telehealth will operate together. The doctor who reviews and tracks a patient will know if the minimum requirements are met that a patient will receive appropriate treatment, including personal visits. If not, the doctor does not have adequate evidence to sustain their medical treatment.
Specialized Care for All
Telehealth’s greatest benefit is the potential to have direct and complicated access to care. For example, rural communities lack a more heavily populated healthcare infrastructure. Rural patients also have to spend hours seeing a doctor who is not practicable or feasible. Telehealth provides patients and clinicians an easy way of keeping in touch between appointments or visiting specialists that might not be able normally.
In fact, areas that are cut off by tornadoes, hurricanes, and other natural disasters will utilize telehealth for increased access to medical care. During recent disasters, emergency surgeons, neurologists, and other medical services have been willing to contact via Skype on the ground in the crisis area. This helped them to have specialized services where they would otherwise not have been able to get them and save lives that might have been lost.
Practical and Relatively Inexpensive
Throughout the past, companies have never been reimbursed for telehealth programs, and they have failed to achieve momentum. Although that has traditionally been a drawback to telehealth, it is evolving for the better. More private benefits providers, along with Medicaid and Medicare, are repaying the benefit of telehealth. As a consequence, patients see it as a more effective, trustworthy method.
In comparison, electronic gadgets such as Fitbits and Apple Watches, which come under the umbrella of telehealth, can be bought by the general customer for a minimal amount. These machines can also be helpful for a variety of purposes, from patients trying to shed excess weight to tracking underlying health problems and decrease potential treatment expenses.
Maximizes Access to Mental Health Care
Mental health care is one of the areas which get most benefited from the use of telehealth. Monitoring appointments with specific mental health issues, such as depression or anxiety, have no clinical testing, and have much to do with relating to the individual.
By making the most of telehealth through video chat, patients are able to get a fast 10-minute appointment, to ease an urgent concern that may have spiraled into something more serious, to get a prescription, and to attend daily therapy sessions. Many insurance providers provide video-based behavioral health services, and other independent agencies provide simulated choices.
Benefits that only Grow
Everyone that uses the healthcare system will have a recovery program that involves telehealth in a form, or by direct access to the primary care doctor or more comprehensive services, such as daily visits to the therapist. As insurance providers begin to cover further telehealth care services, telehealth can only start to expand further broadly and beneficially, helping to improve the public health and well-being in both urban and rural populations. In the future, the vision of health care will be inseparable from telehealth.