What is Telehealth?
Telehealth is certainly nothing new, rising to the fore in 2021 as a response to the need for resilience in the healthcare sector bent by the COVID-19 pandemic. It has been talked about for at least twenty years, even if the availability of new technologies and even more the greater availability of ubiquitous connectivity enables a finally structural development. Telehealth encompasses broader health information services, healthcare services -an all-encompassing one.
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| Telehealth-vs-Telemedicine |
What is Telemedicine?
Telemedicine definition is the digital evolution of traditional medicine. It is a set of innovative tools and processes useful to allow remote communication between doctor and patient. Telemedicine facilitates health services, from diagnosis to therapy up to remote controls to maintain fitness and wellness virtually.
Telemedicine has the task of offering new solutions and perspectives to the constant request for assistance from the population, who would like a more efficient, more dynamic, and closer to people healthcare. Telemedicine has the task of:
Providing tools to facilitate communication and interaction between the doctor and the patient and between the doctors themselves;
Breaking down geographical and temporal barriers, compensating for the non-homogeneous distribution of health services throughout the territory;
Allow the medicine to reach a greater number of people (especially those who live in remote areas or with poor health facilities);
Speed ​​up bureaucratic-administrative procedures;
Help the patient in the research and consultation of the doctor for the patient's wellbeing.
Simplify the online transmission of diagnostic tests while respecting privacy;
Allow online viewing of exams without loss of image quality;
Eliminate long waiting lists, guaranteeing the quality of the service and ensuring the protection of the processing of sensitive personal
Telemedicine Trends: The future belongs to vertically integrated companies
Telemedicine and digital therapies: the future belongs to vertically integrated companies
Distance medicine is one of the sectors of the future. It has become indispensable due to the pandemic. In the future, it will remain so, and the Telemedicine companies that offer it are already thinking about which integrated services to offer to the connected patient.
Telemedicine is undoubtedly one of the most promising sectors in the field of digital health, and its potential has also been widely highlighted by the coronavirus pandemic of recent months. However, among observers, one cannot avoid asking a question: what will happen to patient visits remotely with the help of digital means once the emergency is over and traditional face-to-face visits will return completely safe and practical?
The most frequent answer given by analysts is that videoconferencing visits are not destined to disappear, but that at the same time, they will have to become something more than a simple connection tool for calls between doctors and patients. Companies active in the sector will have to combine their services with classic treatments and digital therapy technologies that are also beginning to make their way in recent years: in short, vertically integrated subjects will survive, who will be able to provide end-to-end solutions and to whom patients can contact for visits, diagnosis, and treatments in all-inclusive solutions.
Visits by the Telemedicine app or videoconference are not enough!
On the one hand, it is difficult for companies offering video conferencing services to doctors to compete with the large Silicon Valley groups active in the video calling sector. Names like Google, WebEx, and Skype already connect doctors and patients with audio and video streams. Instead of being limited to a specialist audience, they already have hundreds of millions of users, enabling them to leverage colossal economies of scale.
On the other hand - the analysts of Heal Capital point out, for example - the telemedicine platforms that deal with linking a team of doctors to internally managed video conferencing services suffer from other problems: they lack a differentiating factor, not to mention that the idea of ​​being connected remotely with a potentially never-before-seen doctor is not exciting for patients.
How is telemedicine transforming the world?
It has completely revolutionized medical services by reaching faraway areas where traditional clinic services have no access. Therefore, we should feel comfortable with a definition and provide health services to those needed using telecommunications. Therefore, the subjectivity of the concept should have more importance than objective terms and definitions.
Telemedicine refers to digital information and communication technologies, such as computers and mobile devices, to access health services remotely and manage health care. It will transform the world with the integration of patient care through digital solutions.
The solution: vertical integration
A company that knows how to take care of the patient in a single all-encompassing digital solution would overcome the problems posed by pure telemedicine services and those that focus exclusively on offering digital therapies to the market. On the one hand, digital therapies can only be prescribed by the appropriate structures. Their functioning and success are still partially dependent on the supervision of an external doctor: the companies that develop and supply them can compete and thrive on the innovation they bring a dowry but risk being penalized by the absence of direct contact with patients.
On the other hand, telemedicine services have, on the one hand, the advantage of direct contact with patients that can be favored by online advertising campaigns. Still, they suffer from the aforementioned problem of a difficult differentiation, which leads many products to resemble each other and compete on price rather than bid.
Any integrated solutions, on the other hand, are candidates to take the best of both propositions by eliminating the weak points: a vertical company that offers remote assistance services integrated with digital therapeutic systems or the prescription of traditional drugs and therapies has both the advantage of offering itself directly to patients and that of being able to follow them with unique and internally developed products, methodologies and practices; among these there are also recurrent check-ups that allow doctors to remodel the prescribed treatment, improving the chances of success of the treatment.
What are the three different types of telemedicine?
Telemedicine mainly comprises 3 elements: remote patient monitoring, archiving and forwarding interactive technologies, but Telehealth includes another component: m-health.
Here's a shortlist of common conditions a primary care doctor may treat via telemedicine:
Allergies.
Arthritic Pain.
Asthma.
Bronchitis.
Colds and Flu.
Diarrhea.
Infections.
Summary
Today telemedicine is gaining ground above all in oncology, cardiology, pediatrics, psychology, radiology, pulmonology, dermatology, neurology, orthopedics, and ophthalmology. Telemedicine also brings great advantages in the monitoring of chronic diseases, in the follow-up and in keeping the doctor informed on the patient's clinical evolution, in the rehabilitation of the sick, in the search for doctors specializing in rare diseases, as well as in emergency situations. Telemedicine is a measure to address curative therapies, but Telehealth is also concerned with preventive measures. Telemedicine is simply responsible for examining and treating the patient through information technology. Still, Telehealthh takes care of different aspects of the health-related field such as educating the individual about health problems, watching over microorganisms increasing that spread diseases, enable services to be as approachable as possible.
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