The Efficacy of Telemedicine in Improving Healthcare Accessibility

Introduction

Background: Telemedicine is fast becoming the order of the day, especially during and post the COVID-19 pandemic periods. Telehealth is the use of information technology systems in the delivery of consultations, diagnosis and follow up on patients without direct physical contact. This shift also gets rid of such issues like place and provider shortage in areas such as rural or remote areas, or other hard to reach places.  (McGrowder et al., 2021)

Thesis Statement: Telemedicine has therefore helped advance the possibility of care delivery and eliminated gaps between patients and healthcare providers, lowered disparities, and innovatively approached logistical issues . (Haimi, 2023)

Scope and Purpose: This review aims at critically in studying  the use of telemedicine in enhancing health care access. It looks into the strengths and weaknesses it comes with then indicates how it can be well implemented in the healthcare systems.

 

2. Findings & Analysis

One Strategy of Medicare that can be reviewed is the:

Findings: Alvarez  (2022) want to underline the aspect of better follow-up care for chronic diseases.

Analysis: The rationale of telemedicine lies in the fact that it eliminates geographical barriers, but to practice it, the needed infrastructure such as the internet, and the necessary technical knows-how, may be weaker in the target populations. These are issues that must be addressed to optimise its use in patients.

Impact on Healthcare Costs

Findings: Studies by Brown et al. (2020) show that telehealth decreases healthcare expenses for patients by offering them one less reason to visit the hospital and ER. Other costs include, therefore, considered to be lower by patient’s aspects such as expenditure to be used in traveling and time spent.

Analysis: However, there are improvements in costs and while implementing technology as well as training for telemedicine, there could be fairly large initial expenses. It means policymakers should find some ways for coverage of these costs buying more time because of their potential benefits in the long term to become scalable.

Patient-Provider Communication

 Findings: Ritunga et. al, also observe in their study of 2024  that telemedicine improves follow-up and consultative communication. But for simple cases, this deficiency does not affect the healthcare quality, while for the complicated ones, the absence of physical examination does distort the diagnostic result.

Analysis: While this means that telemedicine has very high efficiency in flows, allergies, uso-skin, and stone disease, its efficiency decreases as a case becomes complicated. In that case, the use of Hybrid healthcare models of personal and teleconsultations would help avoid diagnostic issues while maintaining the advantages of remote communication.

Digital equity

Findings: Through telemedicine the technologically blessed are more advantaged through telemedicine in rural healthcare .  (Palozzi et al., 2020)

Analysis: Issues such as widely providing computers or tables, information competence, and modern communication facilities for techno’s precaution intend the digital divide in developing exteriors.

Conclusion

Summary of Key Findings:

Telemedicine or m-health has demonstrated that it has major benefit in the increase of the access to health, especially in remote areas and affordable health facilities. However, there are issues associated with, technological capacity, equal access, and limitation of perhaps diagnostic kind that we have to confront.

Previous investigations raise awareness of the telemedicine’s impact and at the same time indicate areas for improvement, including opportunities for equality and the usage of telemedicine in multifaceted medical circumstances.

The field has yet to be explored when it comes to understanding the actual effects of telemedicine on patients’ health and various forms of hybrid models. Further research is needed on how telemedicine can help in closing gaps in healthcare whereby individuals in poor areas receive low quality health care.

It is incumbent upon healthcare stakeholders to research how to improve the effectiveness of telemedicine. This equals creating technologies that are easy to use globally; premising standards that back these technologies; & involving the public and the private sectors to support for everyone.

2. Reference

1. McGrowder, D.A., Miller, F.G., Vaz, K., Anderson Cross, M., Anderson-Jackson, L., Bryan, S., Latore, L., Thompson, R., Lowe, D., McFarlane, S.R. and Dilworth, L., 2021, October. The utilization and benefits of telehealth services by health care professionals managing breast cancer patients during the COVID-19 pandemic. In Healthcare (Vol. 9, No. 10, p. 1401). MDPI.
2. Haimi, M., 2023. The tragic paradoxical effect of telemedicine on healthcare disparities-a time for redemption: a narrative review. BMC Medical Informatics and Decision Making, 23(1), p.95.
3. Alvarez, P., Sianis, A., Brown, J., Ali, A. and Briasoulis, A., 2021. Chronic disease management in heart failure: focus on telemedicine and remote monitoring. Reviews in cardiovascular medicine, 22(2), pp.403-413.
4. Ritunga, I., Claramita, M., Widaty, S. and Soebono, H., 2024. Challenges and recommendations in the implementation of audiovisual telemedicine communication: a systematic review. Korean journal of medical education, 36(3), p.315.
5. Palozzi, G., Schettini, I. and Chirico, A., 2020. Enhancing the sustainable goal of access to healthcare: findings from a literature review on telemedicine employment in rural areas. Sustainability, 12(8), p.3318.

Introduction Background: Telemedicine is fast becoming the order of the day, especially during and post the COVID-19 pandemic periods. Telehealth is the use of information technology systems in the delivery of consultations, diagnosis and follow up on patients without direct physical contact. This shift also gets rid of such issues like place and provider shortage…