Telehealth, to be more precise, delivery, and tracking of health care services via digital means, has revolutionised the traditional health care and Medicaid scenario. With digitization strengthening its grip in all sectors, the so-called ‘Telehealth’ term has resurfaced as a beneficial evolution of the outdated onsite health care scenario. Telehealth can be referred to as virtual health and virtual care, which is a much broader term encapsulating various aspects of the healthcare ecosystem, thereby leading to a win-win situation for both health care providers and the patients opting services. Highlighting some of the beneficial outcomes of telehealth includes remote monitoring and tracking, personalized feedback resulting in better health outcomes, cost-effective solutions without affecting the quality of healthcare services, and many more.
Tele healthcare Technology Applications
Though this term ‘telehealth’ has been introduced for a decade, the COVID-19 scenario has reflected its mere importance in these tough times. With the motto of ‘social- distancing’ amid the COVID-19 outbreak, the remote delivery of health care services has been a digital agenda for service providers all over the world. Initiating from collecting patient data to monitoring, followed by diagnostics and consultation, is the foundation pillar of tele healthcare. Various applications and services are encapsulated under one roof to facilitate and enhance the user’s access to remote Medicare services.
Remote Patient Monitoring (RPM) in Conjunction with Wearables
The rise of wearable device consumption has opened up ample opportunities for the integration of wearables into the evolving field of tele healthcare. Owing to the distance barrier, where onsite monitoring of the patients is time-consuming, expensive, and unreliable, the advent of wearable devices has allowed the health care providers to keep a check on a large scale database of their patients. Blood pressure, heart rate, pulse diagnostics, glucose level, etc. monitoring all these parameters remotely via digital communication technologies have stood out to be more effective and enhanced the ease for patients to have access. In addition to wearables, smartphone apps, RPM technologies also add on to the list of collecting, transmitting, and analyzing the patient data, thereby leading to personalized better health outcomes. On-time medication reminders and health check-up reminders are some of the vital evolvements of the health care system in the modern era.
Diet Counselling
Dietary counselling provides individualized nutritional care for encouraging the modification of eating habits. Obesity, cardiovascular diseases, diabetes, and many other nutritional related diagnostic checks, is now possible with the help of telehealthcare services. Owing to the rapid advances in technology, more and more dietitians are branching out of the traditional office and offering virtual healthcare services, thereby highlighting a brighter impact of telehealthcare. In context to dietetics, nutrition professionals are practicing telehealth and telenutrition, as it is a common medium nowadays to interact, counsel, and track the patient. The tele-nutrition involves the interactive use, by the nutritionists, of the electronic information and technologies for the implementation of the nutrition care processes like assessment, diagnosis, specialized consultation, nutritional intervention plan, monitoring, and evaluation via smartphone apps or any internet-enabled gadgets. This is providing an option to eliminate the face to face appointment for many clients who are unable to commute to the dietician’s office.
Physiotherapy
Physiotherapy is an effective specialist treatment of injury disease and disorder through physical methods. It helps them to restore function and movement in the area that has been affected and even prevents further damage or injury on the previously affected body parts. With many physiotherapists looking forward to the delivery of online services because of the coronavirus pandemic, telehealth is now neighboring the physical therapists or the physiotherapists to deliver high-quality and convenient care, while improving practice profitability. HEP (Home exercise program) in consultation with physiotherapists via digital means, stands out to play a major role in effective personalized outcomes. In addition to this, with the advent of e-commerce in the field of pharmacy, now it is possible for the users to consult a doctor remotely and have their prescriptions noted down without any hassle. Tele healthcare, thus, facilitates the ease with which people can have access to health care facilities. In fact, telehealthcare facilities enable the reading of X-Rays, MRI, CT scans under professional eyes via video conferencing. This enables specialist consultation for the patients without going to the physical location or medical institution outlets.
Conclusion To conclude, Apollo Telehealth is a revamped version of onsite hospital visit from the comfort of your home using a computer, tablet, smartphone, or any other approved electronic technology. It is more than just a virtual visit between the user and the health care provider, thereby enhancing the ease of health care access facilities remotely. Apollo Telehealth is the best telehealth provider in India. Amid the COVID-19 crisis, where social exposure is minimized to control the outbreak of the disease, telehealthcare can be used in multiple ways to treat medical issues remotely, without any hassle. It ensures that ‘you stay at home and stay well’.
