Leveraging the incredible possibilities of telecommunication and information technologies, telemedicine is serving as a devoted healthcare assistant in the healthcare industry. However, till the dawn of new age technology telemedicine was hiding away from the limelight.
But, the story is not the same today;
By 2020 the digital health market is expected to grow beyond a business of 206 billion U.S dollar. Above that, telemedicine practices helped around 7 million people to access health care across the globe till 2018.
Are you surprised of its amazing jump! It’s nothing but of its wanting features.
Come let’s have a look over how telemedicine is revolutionizing the healthcare sector.
1. Accessibility and Affordability
The expense of time, travel and money was the critical factors that drag people back from timely medical assistance.
In addition, the lack of transportation service, financial dimness, and hectic life schedules also were the discouraging factors to skip in-house health care services.
Delivering affordable accessibility to medical services, telemedicine is bringing healthcare service to common people in diversified modes such as;
- Connecting rural population to medical practitioners.
- Virtual treatment and monitoring of chronic patients.
- Online treatment education courses for patients.
- Remote patient communication and follow-up system.
- Virtual diagnosis and report analysis.
- Remote emergency medical assistance.
Further, telemedicine brought healthcare more affordable by offering
- Travel-free consultation and diagnosis for the patients.
- Reduce the length of hospital stay.
- Time-saving medical treatments and aftercare.
- Cost-efficient regular health monitoring facility.
- Consolidated health report channel.
- Remote health tests and report accessibility.
- Remote real-time treatment assistance.Sensible cost for healthcare.
2. Remote Healthcare Service
Today, patients of all kind are depending largely on telehealth services. The arrival of modern self-operable mobile healthcare gadgets made its way easier to find its grip among common people.
Especially, pregnant women, parents of small children, and elder people with chronic diseases find telemedicine as a convenient mode to avail healthcare from home.
Further, it just not only helped the patients to escape from the harrowing expenses, but also helped the physicians and caretakers to eliminate the exhausting work hours.
The facilities that telehealth offers such as:
- Blood sugar meters for diabetic patients.
- Mobile blood Pressure Monitors.
- Mobile clinical-test and image exchange devices.
- Home-based infertility diagnosis and treatment.
- Nutrition tracking and calorie monitoring devices.
Significantly empowered people to access detailed medical treatments from their home itself.
And these amenities helped the patients to
- Understand their health status and seek adequate healthcare.
- Get better and faster diagnosis by more accurate health data.
- Could carry out complete basic health test by themselves.
- Avail healthcare assistance from their comfort.
- Get better awareness about the treatments and procedures.
- Better health education for families.
- Get day and night monitoring and health assistance.
And the face to face interactive video consultation brings a hospital-like environment with real-time monitoring medical devices in their house.
Hence, from the comfort of patients, as well as physicians telemedicine is making medical treatments possible for everyone.
3. Health Education
Mostly, the lack of time and shortage of money hinders the patients from adequate visits and thereby forced to rely on their limited understandings.
However, either for healthcare providers or for patients, the adequate knowledge of diseases and its treatment is essential to manifest a healthy treatment practice.
And telemedicine made its way to educate people far easier than it has been taken date back.
For patients
No patient is seriously aware of their health status, unless they have a proper medical education.
Patients with serious chronic health status may not be aware of the vulnerability that they are passing by. And the case is similar to parents of infants. Therefore, the chances of stepping into risky experiments in treatments are higher.
Proper education about the health conditions and essential treatment exercises are the best way to educate the patient to lead a healthy life.
Hence telemedicine is helping patients and their families to get,
- Understanding about their health status.
- Live demonstration of self-treatment procedures.
- Virtual information access from anywhere.
- Proper personal treatment advices promptly.
- Daily health status report from physicians.
- Essential health practice information for pregnant women.
- Skip unnecessary documentation process.
- Escape from expensive clinical tests.
- Avail aftercare advice right from the home.
- Relevant health education and diet advice.
The interactive consultation session will mitigate the critical quires of patients and encourages following up the treatment procedures intact.
The precautions and weekly reports also can be exchanged to the families of patients via digital means.
For medical practitioners
The revolutionary change that telemedicine brings in medical education is in healthcare simulation. Professional healthcare training is made easier and efficient through this technology.
The revolutionary change that telemedicine brings in medical education is in healthcare simulation. Professional healthcare training is made easier and efficient through this technology.
Moreover, via telemedicine, the doctors could simulate clinical experience through different methods. It offers a wide range of possibility to practice their skills without harming the patients.
Telemedicine is fueling medical practice and education through many dimensions such as:
- Detailed case studies through video interactions.
- Access health reports in faster modes.
- Learn cases without bothering patients.
- Avoid long queue of patients in hospital.
- Frequency monitoring facilities.
Thereby, telemedicine is helping the learners and medical practitioners to equip them with more realistic training. Hence, it enables to educate and train to handle remote clinical events both in the academic and clinical setting.
4. Data Exchange
Managing patient data was a challenging task that has been handled with sheer care in the health industry. The exchange of patient clinical data such as medical history, lab reports, demographic records, and test reports are as confidential as it is.
Breaking all the harrowing challenges telemedicine not only streamlined the patient data exchange but also broaden up the accessibility to store-and-brought the end to end patient files such as:
- Patient Lab reports
- Patient Test results
- Patient Demography
- Daily analysis report
- Patient image files
- Primary care reports
- Treatment history
- Prescription history
- Diagnosis case sheets
- Aftercare reference sheets
- Physician note
- Image files
This secure data exchange channel made detailed diagnosis and further treatments possible from the comfort of patients and physicians.
Further, when the store-and-forward option facilitates the transferring of recorded data files, the real-time telemonitoring enables the patients to exchange the cases directly via digital modes such as video chat or telephone.
5. Faster Diagnosis
Accelerating the time taken for diagnosis has been a daunting challenge for the physicians. Finding the disease is the first step to decide what should be the treatment. The incapability to diagnose the health condition promptly can put the patient’s life at stake.
Coupled with mobile diagnosis devices telemedicine mitigate all challenges that the healthcare providers and patients encountered date back.
Additionally, point-of-care devices and real-time monitoring facilities fueled up the diagnosis and treatment procedures especially in;
- Primary treatment for stroke cases using telemonitoring modes.
- Remote intensive care service for critical patients via tele-ICU.
- Health education for the sufferers of chronic diseases.
- Dental care for patients on rural areas via teledentistry.
- Skin care treatments through teledermatology.
- Emotional and mental health care for children and elders.
The opportunity to figure out the illness from the personal comforts helped the patients to bring themselves more closely to medical treatments.
Researchers have found that mobile e-health gadgets are delivering more accurate results in agility. Thus, not only it improves the quality of healthcare, but also empowered the healthcare system with quality outputs.
Conclusion
Touching all the aspects of healthcare, telemedicine is bringing almost every kind of rudimentary medical services for all in an affordable platter.
Today, a huge number of people are consuming telemedicine services and the numbers are growing over the coming years. Its convenient modes of service and the adherence to daily using technologies fueled its receptiveness.
Previously published at http://medisys.in/ways-telemedicine-revolutionizing-healthcare-sector/