Telemedicine is the use of telecommunications technology to provide real-time health care to patients at a distance.
How does telehealth work?
Telemedicine is a method of delivering health services that can be utilized by a wide range of professionals, including family medical doctors, radiologists, cardiologists, and other specialists. Telemedicine provides audio and video conferencing for medical consultations, remote online monitoring, nurse advice lines, picture transmission, and test report reviews.
How is telemedicine delivered?
Telemedicine can be delivered using video-conferencing, audio communication, and/or text-messaging using mobile phones, tablets, and desktop computers.
Who participates in telemedicine?
Healthcare professionals can use telemedicine to see patients or to consult with other care providers. Anyone can participate in telehealth as it helps. Here are the most common practices utilizing telemedicine now with many more practices soon to follow:
What can telemedicine be used for?
Telemedicine has many applications in healthcare, including standard clinical care, counseling or therapy, patient education, professional consultant or supervision, and more.
What are the four main types of telemedicine?
Store-and-Forward
Store-and-Forward telemedicine is a way for healthcare professionals to exchange patient diagnostic information such as test results, medical imaging, video recordings, and other data with a practitioner or specialist. It’s similar to email, but it’s achieved using a system that has advanced security features to protect patient confidentiality and maintains HIPAA compliance.
Patients, health care professionals, and clinicians will all review the details as it is convenient for them, making store-and-forward telemedicine an easy place for them to communicate. The solution offers patients with connections to a treatment team made up of providers from various areas, including those isolated by long distances and time zones.
Remote Patient Monitoring (RPM)
Remote Patient Monitoring (RPM) employs a variety of electronic instruments that keep track of a patient’s condition and vital symptoms remotely. This is widely used in the treatment of long term illnesses including heart disease, cancer, diabetes, stroke, and asthma. Remote surveillance has a number of advantages, including cost efficiency, increased monitoring frequency, and increased patient satisfaction.
Real-Time Telemedicine
Patients and doctors utilize video conferencing devices to hear and view each other during a real-time telemedicine consultation. While some forms of telemedicine are used to supplement conventional in-person appointments, real-time telemedicine may be used in certain cases to replace a visit to the doctor’s office. It is also used for primary and emergency care, follow-up visits, and treatment with medication and chronic diseases. Telemedicine experiences can be performed utilizing equipment that is developed to secure patient privacy and adhere to the HIPAA’s stringent patient safety requirements. Practices that utilize real-time telemedicine include: Telenursing, Teleneuropsycology, Telepharmacy, Telerehabilitation, and more.
mHealth
Primary care and public health practice and education supported by electronic networking technologies such as cell phones, portable computers (laptops, tablets, etc.), and PDAs. Applications may vary from personalized text messaging encouraging healthier habits to broad-scale disease outbreak warnings.
What Equipment is needed for Telemedicine patients?
There are four basic pieces of equipment needed in order for telemedicine to work efficiently:
Internet connection
Ideally with 15Mbps Download speed and 5Mpbs Upload speed capability for smooth video connection.
Computer or mobile device
Doxy.Me is a web based program so it can be run with just an internet connection, regardless of what operating system is used. Supports both windows and Mac devices.
Microphone
Most computers and mobile devices have a built-in microphone but older models may lack this piece of equipment. We recommend models with a USB connection as these are usually plug and play devices with minimal setup required.
Camera
Internal cameras are common among late model computers and mobile devices. If you are lacking this piece of equipment there are many affordable external webcams that can be utilized. Like the microphone, we recommend you choose one with a usb connection as these will be the easiest to set up.
Where can telemedicine be provided?
Telemedicine can be provided to a patient at home or work, or at another clinic or hospital. Now with mobile devices, you or the patient can be anywhere with access to the internet.
