Telehealth has become one of the most significant technological steps in the times of COVID-19. It offers an efficient and safe mode without the risk of the spread. It has found a remarkable space and importance, especially when social distancing is the primary measure for preventing the outbreak. Even the World Health Organization (WHO) has recommended telehealth to be one of the necessary services for building a strengthened response towards COVID-19. As per the stated WHO policy, telemedicine should be one of the alternatives for the established models of clinical decision support services.
Overstretched and Overburdened Healthcare Resources
European and American countries have severe shortages of the number and quality of healthcare experts. The number of healthcare professionals varies from 4 doctors per thousand people in Spain to 2.1 doctors per thousand people in Brazil. The age bracket of health professionals is one of the major concerns as well, with 33% of the doctors being older than 55 years of age. It makes healthcare personnel at a high risk of coronavirus pandemic exposure. In such a scenario, the application of telemedicine or telehealth becomes the only viable technology that can mitigate the risk by eliminating the interactions among doctors and patients
Flattening the COVID-19 Demand Curve
Telehealth technology can result in significantly flattening the demand curve over the healthcare systems. It can slow down the spreading and transmission, enabling better disposal of healthcare resources. The world is already witnessing a surge of telehealth providers, which, in a way, can be called a real-time trial. Some of the use cases of telehealth include examples of home isolation, mild cases monitoring and treatment from a distance, patient follow-up after discharge, psychological support tools for patients, e-scheduling for clinical tests, and management of patients’ waiting time. Coronavirus pandemic is proving to be an assessment that would demonstrate the responsiveness of telemedicine systems.
Challenges Before Telemedicine Solutions
The main challenge in the implementation of telehealth solutions is the scalability of the system. Rapidly rising coronavirus cases require the systems to enhance the scalability as per the number of users, and that too, within a matter of few hours. Herein cloud-based telemedicine solutions could prove helpful in scaling the infrastructure. With having such a significant number of users on board, telemedicine systems should be able to offer an easy to use utility that can be made available via already existing apparatus such as tablets, laptops, and smartphones. It can be achieved only through cloud-based telemedicine IT infrastructure.
Secure Exchange of Health Data
As we have seen, incremented incidents of cyber-attacks on hospital management systems, thus securely exchanging and storing data becomes a critical concern. The French Ministry of Social Affairs and Health has already published the names of recommended telehealth solution providers for its citizens. These systems adhere to the mandates of the EU's General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR). Relevant data protection regulations are required to be invoked all through the world, howsoever, there they should be pragmatic rules based on practical needs, not just other hurdles of red tape.
Regulations in Telehealth
Numerous countries across the globe, including United States, have announced regulations for telehealththe systems for containing the outbreak of coronavirus. It seems that the rest of the severely affected countries would follow suit and soon would announce their regulations for the usage of telehealth applications and their subsequent integration with existing technologies. All these efforts in the direction of targeting the COVID-19 pandemic hopefully would bear results soon. In such extremely testing times of COVID-19, when health resources are heavily burdened, only the prudent deployment of scalable telehealth solutions seems to show a ray of hope.
Implementation of Telemedicine Platform
Telehealth solutions possess the capability to integrate numerous medical institutions in a single network, which is a central clinical location. The proposed network would combine all healthcare organizations located at various geographical locations such as remote clinics, government clinics, private clinics, prevention centers, rehabilitation centers within a specified geographical network. The priority would be on the functions of e-prescribing, EHR system integration, files and images upload, online sharing of reports and analytics, electronic scheduling, safe messaging, and audio/video conferencing.
Wrap Up
The medical requirement of the coronavirus era is the implementation of the best telehealth practices and solutions from all over the globe. USA, China, Israel, South Korea, and France are among those nations that have a reasonably robust healthcare system with adequate infrastructure to innovate and scale. The combined experience and technological setup have already come to the aid, and we are witnessing numerous examples of the same, albeit the scale is not that big. It is vital for nations across the globe to share their telemedicine expertise, innovation, and resources. It would prove effective if the effort is deployed with close cooperation and coordination.
Software development companies have been developing telemedicine and remote patient monitoring software solutions help healthcare organizations align the operational, financial, and clinical goals. Their model of high-quality remote care and enhanced patient-doctor collaborations is being continuously validated by the success of our three remote patient monitoring platforms. A major constraint to the widespread adoption has been CMS and private player reimbursement at par with on-site physician office visits. Now the things are changing. Although it's unfortunate that it took a global pandemic to highlight the technology's viability, we're encouraged that this modality of healthcare delivery is here to stay, grow, and improve people's lives.
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