Importance of Technology in the Medical World: Naimish Sinha

Telemedicine is rapidly evolving to provide increased access to high-quality healthcare that is efficient and cost-effective. Telemedicine is a service that seeks to improve a patient’s health by permitting two-way, real-time interactive communication between the patient and the physician at a distant site. Although similar, the terms ‘telehealth’ and ‘telemedicine’ should not be used interchangeably. Telehealth refers to the use of telecommunications and information technology (IT) to provide access to health assessment, diagnosis, intervention, consultation, supervision and information across distance.

Therefore, telehealth can be considered a broader concept of telemedicine that uses technology used to collect and transmit patient data such as telephones, email and remote patient monitoring (RPM) devices for the purposes of providing health education or ancillary healthcare services. Over the past several decades, improvements in technology have dramatically increased the accessibility and quality of care that is available digitally, says Naimish Sinha a Technology Expert & Mentor.

Despite this, telemedicine has not been implemented widely due to heavy regulatory laws and a lack of supportive payment structures. In the face of the current pandemic, providers have been forced to increase their utilization of telehealth services at the expense of traditional face-to-face patient encounters. Researchers have been exploring the advantages and disadvantages of telemedicine compared with traditional patient encounters. During the pandemic, telemedicine has the potential to greatly improve access to quality, affordable care for patients while maintaining physical distancing for the safety of both patients and providers.

In addition to virtual visits, text, email and mobile phone applications as well as data from wearable devices can be used to share information between patients and clinicians. In this article, we aim to discuss the evolution of the telemedicine landscape, its utilisation during the current pandemic and how we expect this technology to be implemented in the post pandemic world.