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Measuring Quality of Healthcare Across Borders: The Role of International Healthcare Accreditation in Medical Travel
Published in Frederick J. DeMicco, Ali A. Poorani, Medical Travel Brand Management, 2023
Elizabeth Ziemba, Claudia Mika
What started as a response to the pandemic has now been widely accepted by providers and patients as time-saving, efficient, and lower cost alternatives to in-person visits. There are issues that must be addressed to ensure that telehealth and telemedicine services protect the privacy and security of the patients’ information. Rules, regulations, and statutes must be created, updated, and harmonized within countries and across borders to ensure that the services are being delivered by duly licensed healthcare professionals. Getting healthcare providers and systems to “talk to each other” requires compatibility of electronic health records and other technological challenges to be resolved.
Telemedicine in Ophthalmology
Published in Ching-Yu Cheng, Tien Yin Wong, Ophthalmic Epidemiology, 2022
Jane Scheetz, Samantha Simkin, Zachary Tan, Shuan Dai, Mingguang He
The store-and-forward method is when patient data are exchanged between two or more individuals at different times. This is sometimes called the asynchronous method. For example, a patient’s retinal images are transmitted to an ophthalmologist who later sends them back with a grading outcome for diabetic retinopathy (DR) and referral recommendations. In contrast, real-time, or synchronous teleophthalmology, requires involved personnel to be present concurrently. This form of telemedicine is historically performed in real time using video or teleconferencing technology and aims to mimic a traditional clinician–patient consultation. The use of real-time ophthalmology encourages discussion of ocular history and further exploration of examination findings between the patient, referrer, and attending clinician. Real-time teleophthalmology focuses on diagnosis, management, and therapeutic intervention whereas store-and-forward is largely restricted to disease screening. The combination of store-and-forward and real-time teleophthalmology is referred to as the hybrid method. Lions Outback Vision has successfully implemented a hybrid teleophthalmology service in rural Western Australia (WA) (7, 8). The program is described below.
Viability of Information and Correspondence Innovation for the Improvement of Communication Abilities in the Healthcare Industry
Published in Ayodeji Olalekan Salau, Shruti Jain, Meenakshi Sood, Computational Intelligence and Data Sciences, 2022
Telemedicine: It is a medical information exchange between two distant people or places to improve patient health status via electronic communication modes. Its rapid growth includes various types of services either using audiovisual calls or via Internet-based calling applications. Telemedicine is also a part of the hospital setting to deliver clinical care, product, and services to patients and society.
The effects of treatment via telemedicine interventions for patients with depression on depressive symptoms and quality of life: a systematic review and meta-analysis
Published in Annals of Medicine, 2023
Yin-Hwa Shih, Jiun-Yi Wang, Po-Han Chou, Kuan-Han Lin
During the outbreak of the COVID-19 pandemic, health services accelerated the global use of telemedicine. Numerous studies have revealed the advantages of telemedicine, such as reducing healthcare expenditure, improving the efficiency of healthcare delivery, and producing good clinical outcomes [8]. Patients with depression require regular mental consultation and deprescribing. Telemedicine is widely adapted in depression care [9] and for acute medical conditions in psychology practice [10–14]. Recent systematic review has reported the effectiveness of video-based psychotherapy in reducing depressive symptoms compared with in-person services [15]. However, an important literature gap still exists in terms of the treatment effects via telemedicine interventions quality of life and work and social functioning in patients with depression.
Pediatric weight management amid the COVID-19 pandemic: a natural telemedicine experiment
Published in Children's Health Care, 2022
Roohi Y. Kharofa, Kristin Stackpole, Catherine Anthony, Rebekah Moorhead, Robert M. Siegel
COVID-19 led to the precipitous cancellation of all in-person appointments at our PWM clinic. Given the need to limit non-essential in-person care, insurers quickly expanded coverage to include telemedicine. In order to continue to provide services, our PWM center switched our clinical services to an exclusive telemedicine format. Similar to clinic visits, the pandemic put a halt to in-person weekly exercise classes led by our exercise physiologists and cooking events hosted by our dietitians. As a response, we expanded our social media content to address added barriers to healthy eating and exercise secondary to COVID-19 school closures and home confinement (Dunton GF & Wang, 2020; Pietrobelli et al., 2020). The aims of this study were to describe PWM telemedicine care utilization and optional social media engagement for patients at our PWM center during the first 6 weeks of the pandemic (referred to as the “COVID-19 shutdown”), when all in-person care was halted. While the COVID-19 pandemic is a unique event in our history, the risk of future public health threats that may prompt rapid turnover to exclusive telemedicine are conceivable. As the majority of PWM programs have returned to mostly in-person care given the need to collect objective data, chronicling and systematically learning form a rapid, exclusive telemedicine implementation will help inform future efforts, if they are warranted.
Anterior segment imaging using a simple universal smartphone attachment for patients
Published in Seminars in Ophthalmology, 2022
Vineet Pramod Joshi, Ashish Jain, Rathinam Thyagrajan, Pravin Krishna Vaddavalli
With the recent worldwide lockdown due to COVID-19, the importance of telemedicine has increased manifold. Smartphones can play an essential role in telemedicine due to the cutting edge technology, ease of use, accessibility, improved camera, and technology.10 As a result, multiple smartphone-based teleconsultation platforms seem to be becoming popular.1,11–14 In tele-ophthalmology, an ocular image would be an essential value added to the online consultation process.11,15 The primary end-user of these platforms is the patient. Hence, it is vital to standardize anterior segment ocular imaging using a smartphone by considering limited training and expertise by the user. In this paper, we try to find a universal solution to improve the quality of anterior segment imaging of the eye using various mid-range smartphones, which are currently restricted in their hardware and software features, limiting their ability to capture good clinical grade images of the eye. The smartphone attachment, GrabiTM Lite, using a customized imaging protocol, was tested against the current gold standard, slit lamp photography, which gave us insights into the limitations of the current version and future scope of improvement in the quality of images. Using the GrabiTMLite with the imaging protocol by patients, we could test a novel way of teleconsultation, where patients play an active role in diagnostic imaging. This highlights its possible use along with online tele-ophthalmology platforms and improves their efficacy.