Good Essay On Telemedicine

The American Telemedicine Association defines telemedicine as “the use of medical information exchanged from one site to another via electronic communications to improve a patient’s clinical health status”. Telemedicine provides services such as primary care and specialist referral services, remote patient monitoring, consumer medical and health information and medical education. There are several benefits of telemedicine to patients. First, is that they are able to be with their family because they do not have to travel extensively. Savings from travel expenses could be realized. The patient is also given education courses on proper nutrition. However, telemedicine has its drawbacks too such as inadequate evaluation of the patient and some possible technological malfunctions like power outages which can interrupt the consultation with the physician.
E-visit, according to The American Academy of Family Physicians is “an evaluation and management service provided by a physician or other qualified health professional to an established patient using a web-based or similar electronic-based communication network for a single patient encounter”. Like telemedicine, e-visits cost less than an actual visit to the doctor. An advantage of e-visit is that the physician can easily be reached by the patient. The doctor can review tests results through emails sent by patients. It should be noted though that e-visits are billable. Some physicians however doubt the accuracy of the diagnosis when e-visits are done, as compared to actual visits.
The provider-to-patient email is a form of online communication between healthcare providers and patients to discuss health-related matters. The advantage of this healthcare tool is that it is less time consuming because patients do not have to queue in hospitals and wait for the doctor to arrive. The main drawback of this type of communication is the privacy and confidentiality issues. Emails can be intercepted or misdirected; thus, the patient health information may not be kept private.
The top three obstacles to telemedicine are the complexity of the telemedicine equipment, system downtime and security and privacy concerns.

References

American Academy of Family Physicians. (2008). e-visits. Retrieved from American Academy of Family Physicians: http://www.aafp.org/about/policies/all/e-visits.html
American Telemedicine Association. (2012). What is telemedicine? Retrieved from American Telemedicine Association: http://www.americantelemed.org/about-telemedicine/what-is-telemedicine#.VQK2Oo6Ud7c
McLain, P. (2014, October 23). Telemedicine: The top 3 obstacles facing clinicians today. Retrieved from Becker's Healthcare: http://www.beckershospitalreview.com/white-papers/telemedicine-the-top-3-obstacles-facing-clinicians-today.html
Telemedicine.com, Inc. (2015). What is telemedicine? Retrieved from Telemedicine.com: http://www.telemedicine.com/whatis.html