Use of internet for medical needs for health care related tasks, health information, filled prescription, to contact physician and also for medical insurance has shot up. 59% of telehealth services happens through telephone, where 41% happens through email and 29% happens through messages, says a survey by Rock Health. Over the past 10 years, telehealth activity has grown impressively in different service lines and there is an interesting growth rates and in volumes in different telehealth services. Delivering faster, better, cost less and convenient care is provided by the telehealth services but there may be difficulties in certain aspects like virtual visits, remotely monitoring patients for some providers.
Listed below are a few recents trends in telehealth:
Patient centred medical homes
Recently, PCMH have more positive patient experiences in advanced primary care.A relationship based system, partnering with patients and understanding their requirements by knowing their unique needs, culture, value and preferences. This method understands that the patients and families are the core members of the care team and also it is ensured that the patients have all the knowledge in regards to the care plans. Not only that but also with the help of the software we will be able to deliver our duty to the fullest satisfaction of the patients without using any hardware technology.
Telehealth applications
Telehealth is getting popular and one of the reasons is because of its virtual ability. Sometimes we may not be able to visit our doctor in person because of the time constraints or some situation where you are unable to leave your home. With the advancement in technology, now you can remotely reach your doctor and get proper consultation every day. With the help of your smartphone, you can install these telehealth applications on the go and reach your doctor anytime and anywhere.
A patient survey conducted by NCBI says that more than 50% people using health-related mobile applications. Another research conducted by markets and markets says that the mhealth solutions will reach $90 billion by 2022 and right now it is $21 billion.
Data Security in Telehealth
Security has always been a barricade for maintaining the data when it comes to telemedicine but not anymore. We are halfway through 2017 and all telehealth applications are making sure that the data is highly protected. Now we all know that everyone is accessing data with the help of applications and it is necessary to highly protect these data since it involves costs. Healthcare security policies which make accessing the data tougher by encrypting them or two-factor authentication for better security.
Types of diseases
There are few fatal diseases in the USA which is attributed to 75% of deaths. Among them, chronic diseases such as asthma, COPD, diabetes, heart failure, hypertension are in top ranks. Stats report says, one in every four deaths occurs due to such diseases. All these diseases require continuous monitoring that increases the workload of care providers which is the most challenging. To reduce this, health care system recently started focusing on promoting “self-care” for chronically ill patients so that physicians can only be spent time on supervising them with the help of telehealth technology. Telehealth helps physicians to remotely monitor and manage their patient health that saves both time and cost. A study states, patients have saved 9 years of travel time and 3 million dollars in travel costs after started using Telehealth.
Age groups
Problems in our body come along with age and multiple chronic conditions are directly related to once age. One in five Americans will be 65, says a survey report, also, 80% of the people who are aged 65+ will have multiple chronic conditions. These chronic patients have a high frequency of getting readmitted. It is important to take at most care for the aged people and now telehealth is helping these aged patients in different aspects. Starting from home health care to handy mobile applications, telehealth is highly successful. After employing health service, hospital readmission rate has decreased 50% for heart failure and 44% for other illnesses. Over 8000 patients’ who use ehealth service find it similar that of an in-person office visit and 21% of them says that quality of care of virtual visits is equal or higher than an in-person visit.
It clearly shows, how telehealth is playing a vital role in healthcare industry. A good telehealth platform must be HIPAA compliant- it should protect health data information, allows patients and provider to schedule appointments, and should support online chat. HealthViewX can assist you in providing a better chronic care management solution where you can easily automate your ccm documents and integrate with your mobile phones. With HIPAA compliant platform hosted in cloud server, HealthViewX CCM solution is highly secure.
