How Telemedicine is Changing the Healthcare Landscape

Telemedicine utilises communications technologies and information to deliver clinical services from a distance, including video conferencing consultations between physicians and patients up to advanced remote surgery procedures.

Virtual check-ins for chronic condition patients can reduce cancelled appointments and improve outcomes. Immunocompromised patients no longer need to brave exposures to infectious diseases.

Access to Care

With these appointments, telemedicine rids patients of miles of driving as well as costs of petrol, childcare needs and lost wages. Telemedicine is especially important for rural Americans since it is often difficult to get patients COVID-19 pandemic

Telemedicine has been shown to decrease the rate of no-show appointments. Much research on hybrid models combining face-to-face with remote monitoring also demonstrates that telemedicine can meet a diverse range of healthcare needs in diverse patient populations.

Patients with chronic illnesses – such as diabetes – can receive optimised treatment and outcomes with frequent virtual check-ins with providers. And patients should be satisfied with the quality of care as a result. Telemedicine has resulted in improved outcomes and access to care; that potential should be a priority in order ensure sustainability for all patient populations.

Patient Outcomes

Usage increased significantly during the COVID-19 pandemic, and its use has continued to rise since. More than 37 million adults have used some form of telemedicine service within the past year.

Telemedicine also helps lower healthcare costs by improving patient outcomes. It is evident, for instance, that remote monitoring services and virtual consultations can boost consumer self-care by increasing adherence to medical regimens. Telemedicine also helps lower healthcare costs by improving patient outcomes. By facilitating efficient emergency room triage, it prevents avoidable admissions to urgent care facilities while routing non-urgent care cases to more appropriate settings.

Further research on telemedicine yields positive results, and results are strengthened by methodological variations and wide study populations, but these differences create a barrier to do head-to-head comparisons. And as technology evolves daily, one should remember that the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) strengthens data security and privacy regulations at a fast pace, and organisations must be updated.

Reimbursement

Telemedicine has the potential to revolutionise care, providing access to care, improving outcomes, and being self-sustaining through reimbursement.

Given that telemedicine is likely to become ubiquitous in the family home, the issue of equitable access to it will become more pressing still. The Covid-19 pandemic has played its part in breaking down attitudes towards remote healthcare services, in making them more accessible to many more patients; legislative changes have also greater widespread the availability of telehealth; and new products are arriving on the market for remote adherence monitoring – devices that send data back to your doctor, for example, such as cameras monitoring patients, or Bluetooth pillboxes that beep when their contents should be swallowed.

Recently it was reported that more than 50 per cent of American adults have made use of telehealth services during the past 12 months. There have been differences in utilisation rates, for example, women, higher educated and with higher income levels are more likely to use virtual healthcare than others; telemedicine service utilisation varies in different regions and at different degrees of urbanisation; innovative solutions are needed to maximise its use.

International Collaboration

Through this interface, patients can easily make appointments with their providers, which can open available times that better fit into their schedules and enable them to better follow up with care, thereby improving health outcomes.

Telemedicine can also reduce no-show rates and increase the engagement and continuity of care. In a retrospective cohort study, phone visits were shown to significantly reduce the no-show rate in an opioid use disorder bridge clinic setting.

While such studies are reassuring, without addressing which aspects of telemedicine matter to patients and learning how to maximise use of it to increase access to healthcare, strategies such as embracing nurse-led telehealth models, which have demonstrated high satisfaction with digital engagement, as well as improved digital literacy and data quality, creating cost-effective routes to improve healthcare access, won’t achieve their potential benefits.