HEA610 Masters Project: Benefits and Limitations of Telehealth

This essay provides a comprehensive literature review of telehealth, examining its benefits and limitations in clinical practice. It discusses various telehealth modalities, including live video technology, store-and-forward methods, remote patient monitoring, and mobile health (mHealth) technology. The essay highlights the advantages of telehealth, such as saving time and costs for patients, improving efficiency for providers, and increasing revenue for hospitals. It also addresses the limitations, including privacy concerns, potential lack of patient-provider relationship development, and liability issues. The essay uses examples to illustrate how telehealth can improve patient care in various situations, such as managing hypoglycemia in diabetes patients and providing expert consultations in remote communities. It concludes by emphasizing the need for addressing the limitations to ensure the safe and effective implementation of telehealth technologies.

Running head: TELEHEALTH
TELEHEALTH
Name of the student:
Name of the university:
Author note:

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Introduction:
Tele-health is seen to encompass a broad variety of technologies as well as tactics that
serves in delivering virtual medical, health as well as education services. It should not be
considered as the specific service but should mainly be considered as the collection of means
required for enhancing care as well as education delivery. The word telemedicine can be applied
to the traditional clinical diagnosis that gets delivered with the help of technology. Tele-health on
the other hand encompasses a wide range of diagnosis as well as management, education as well
as other related fields of healthcare. This technology mainly helps in facilitating the diagnosis,
consultation, treatment, care management, education as well as self-management while the
patient is at his own original site and the healthcare professional is at the distant site (Kruse et al.,
2017). Researchers are of the opinion that this form of technology mainly helps in the self-
management as well as caregiver support for the patients and it is also seen to include
synchronous interactions as well as asynchronous store and forward transfers (Kveder, Coye &
Everett, 2014). This assignment will be based on literature review about how this technology
associated itself with different negative and positive aspects and how different factors of their
technology is aiding in patient care in medical and infectious ward.
Researchers like Serper and volk (2018) have talked about an important service provided
by one of the medium of telehealth that had often been found to be extremely helpful in caring
and saving lives of patients under various stressful circumstances. The paper describes one of the
medium of telehealth in details that is called the live video technology. It can be described as the
two-way interaction medium between the healthcare provider and the service user that may the
patient himself, or the caregiver through the utilization of the audio-visual telecommunications
technology. The researchers had been seen to refer this mode of technology as the “real-time”

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technology and have spoken of the ways where it can be used as the substitute for an in-person
encounter when it is not available. Siddiqui et al. (2017) have stated that the service users had
often spoken about many of their experiences when this technology had acted as a life saving
technology. It can be used both for diagnostic as well as consultative treatment services. An
example can be provided in this situation how such services in the medication ward can help in
treatment of people in crucial situations. There might be incidence of hypoglycemia in diabetes
patients after they are discharged from medical ward when medications or insulin are taken more
than once mistakenly. This might have negative consequences on the health of the patient
resulting in threatening outcomes. In such situations, live video technology of telehealth would
become useful where the caregivers can immediately get in touch with healthcare professionals.
The later can save the life of the person with immediate paramedic care before being transferred
to the hospital for further treatment in the medical ward.
Another important form of telehealth that has been also contributing to the quality care if
the patent largely is called “store and forward method”. This mode mainly works where a patient
or a general physician can transmit the recorded health history of the patients through a secured
mode of electronic communication system to another practitioner, for example an expert in a
particular health domain (Rajda et al., 2018). The later can utilize the information for evaluating
the case if the patient and accordingly rendering a service that is outside of a real time or like that
of the live interaction (Pulley et al., 2018). On close analysis, it can be seen that the there exists a
basic difference between the live video interaction and that of the storage and forward
technology. In comparison to the former, the later provides the professionals with access to data
only after it has been collected and involves different communication tools of which emails are
the most common. The former ensures live interaction and no storing of any information

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henceforth. An example can be provided in order to provide a detailed understanding of the
entire procedure of working of this system. There might be many communities where service
users come to general physicians with complex disorders. In such cases, the professionals might
need to guidance of expert opinion from surgeons to other specialized expert healthcare
professionals. In such situations, this telehealth medium found to be extremely helpful in not
only providing quality and safe care to patient but also reducing the cost of the resources that
would have been required otherwise.
Remote patient monitoring is one important medium of telehealth. Ong et al. (2016)
states that with the help of this medium, personal health and medical data collection from an
individual persons present in one location is sent through electronic communication to another
provider. The later provider is present in different location for use in care as well as the related
support. Studies have appraised the medium of working in this telehealth medium as it helps the
provider in continuing to track healthcare data for a service user who had already been
discharged to home or another care facility from hospitals or other healthcare centers. This form
of telehealth is highly credible in reducing the rates of readmissions that in turn reduces the
chances of patient suffering and wastages of healthcare resources. Many other studies have also
supported this, stating that how remote patient monitoring can help individual service users to
stay healthy in their homes as well as aim the community without the need of physically
attending the service providers chamber for treatment, diagnosis and care. This can be appraised
with the help of an example (Bashi et al., 2017). Often it becomes very difficult for old patients
to travel to the healthcare organizations if they require treatments or guidance or if they have to
come for regular follow up check-ups. This method of telehealth helps in reduction of the

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difficulties so this situation as the professionals can monitor the health of the patients remotely
and can track their progress through their medium efficiently.
Another type of medium that is also helpful in providing safe and secured practice for the
patients and is currently gaining fame is the mobile health technology of the m(Health)
technology. This method mainly helps in healthcare as well as public health service and mobile
communication devices mainly support education. These are mainly seen to include cell phones,
tablet computers as well as the PDAs. Researchers have found that applications under this can
range from targeted text messages that help in promoting healthy behaviors as well as providing
wide scale alerts about different diseases outbreaks in the community as well as in the states
(Kirschner et al., 2017). For example, one can take the help of the present day applications that
are prepared for the overcoming the symptoms of obesity. These applications are seen to contain
calorie-measuring calculations that state how much calorie is gained and the different ways for
its reduction. There are also technologies that measure the heart rate, kilometers people have run
and accordingly measure the calorie burn that had occurred. All these ensure them with best self-
care management. Many other applications help service users to remain associated with each
other over the globe and exchange of various information tales place that enhances the
knowledge of the service users. It looks like a social network connecting different service
providers and service users, helps patients in gaining knowledge, and develops heath literacy (De
La Torre-Díez et al., 2015).
A large number of benefits remain associated with telehealth and different papers have
been published which had tried to capture the benefits of telehealth from the perspective of
different healthcare stakeholders. One of the paper conducted by Dorsey and Topol (2016) had
helped in signifying the benefits of telehealth from the perspective of patients. One of the papers

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has conducted interviews of the patients where it is seen that telehealth helps in saving the time
and energy spent in travelling to meet the healthcare providers. It is indeed true that due to the
presence of telehealth, travelling of the service users to the distant specialists has become no
more necessary. This also helps in the saving of the cost required for travelling as well as the
expense of staying in the big cities. One of the studies have suggested that hospitalized patients
who are treated and supervised by an expert through the telehealth services also have the
advantage of stating in their home community where the families and friends can easily visit.
There have been evidences that show that patients staying closer to their home show faster
recovery. Again, it is also seen that this form of communication and treatment medium also
reduces danger faced by many patients during the travelling in wintertime. Individuals also do
not have to take offs for the whole day from their work in order to see a specialists or to take
their children to the doctor. Children also tend to miss less number of schools when their parents
or guardians can arrange for telehealth services (Kao et al., 2016).
Huge number of benefits also remains associated with telehealth for the providers. These
include circuit riding professionals to start providing care through this medium helping them to
save a large amount of windshield time helping in converting hours spent in travelling to hours
spent in seeing patients. Practices can become more efficient as they are also able to provide
service to detail patients. They can also serve more patients reducing the chances of provider
shortages. Rural providers can also participate effectively in continuous education through the
help of the telehealth connections, thereby avoiding travel rime and out of practice time
(Papanagnou, Sicks & Hollander, 2015).
Some of the benefits experienced by the hospitals are that they receive more revenues
from patients as more number of patients can be provided service within short period by distal

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specialists. Many of the studies also suggest of the hospitals experiencing more control over
what kind of services to be offered. Better image in the community due to expanded services,
staffs receiving training over the telehealth connections and thereby reducing need for travel are
some of the other benefits. Administrators are also seen to save travel time and funds by the
attending of meetings over telehealth (Lunney et al., 2018).
While many of the literature found through effective searching shows the benefits of
telehealth, there are also important papers, although less had been able to find out the different
limitations of telehealth services. The main three limitations for telehealth is the privacy of the
patient information, improper relationship or lack of relationship development between patients
and the provider. It also remains associated with liability for the provider and the organizations
that remain affiliated with it.
Researchers like Valdivieso et al. (2018), while describing the limitations of telehealth
from the perspective of the consumers, have stated the lowering of trust between the patient as
well as the provider. There had been also evidences where the technology might also intimidate
the users like that in the elderly population. There might be also certain levels of uncertainty that
they feel to be associated with medical consultation privacy.
On the behalf of the providers, many of them had been seen to state in the interviews
conducted in the researches that there remains an importance in the requirement of new design
on the risk management. Many of the researchers are of the opinion that patient-professional
relationship with different population of service users has become more complicated with this
new medium of technologies mainly because of the changes in dynamics in delivery (Harzheim
et al., 2016). There might be also experts who have higher clinical and ethical practice

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knowledge and skills but might lack technical expertise. It also results in difficulty
communicating with elder patients who have dementia or sensory impairment. Healthcare
organizations also face limitations, as they require developing a telemedicine specific policies as
well as procedures along wit increase in risk of the liability. There might be limited technological
support in the rural areas (Bonsignore et al., 2018).
From the above discussion, it becomes clear that telehealth is one of the most important
medium of treatment in the present generation as it is associated with delivery of quality and safe
care to patients through the application of technology. Different types of mediums are now
available which help patients to get treatment in different scenarios. These are the Mobile health
(mHealth), Remote patient monitoring (RPM), Store-and-forward (asynchronous) and Live video
(synchronous). A large number of benefits remains associated with it like saving the cost of
travel as well as saving of time for patients, saving cost of healthcare resources for authorities.
Providers can treat more patients in lesser time increasing not only revenue but meeting the
larger demands of healthcare services. However, certain negative aspects also remain associated
which are lack of therapeutic relationship between patients and providers, trust issues, chances of
loss of privacy, limited technological support in rural areas, technological inefficiency of many
professionals, complicated communication technologies and others. It is important for
professionals to judge the cots-benefit ratio and accordingly implement them in care practices to
ensure better quality lives of patients.

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