Remote healthcare and telemedicine: latest
In the last year, remote healthcare has made some giant leaps forward. Although technology and services for the remote treatment and monitoring of patients have been available for some time, medicine previously tended to follow the traditional approach of diagnosis via physical contact and relevant paperwork.
The Covid-19 pandemic has turned this stagnant situation around, showing the world the potential of a phenomenon known as telemedicine. In 2020 alone, digital support for patients has drastically increased, leading to a real improvement in the doctor/patient relationship.
How telemedicine works
The term telemedicine refers to quite a broad concept, which includes many different models of remote healthcare. Its most common applications involve services such as:
- Consultations between specialist doctors, useful when identifying the most suitable treatment in complex cases;
- Remote examinations and diagnoses, which can easily diagnose the most common health problems;
- Monitoring of the patients’ state of health, via the use of IoT devices;
- Access to a doctor outside normal surgery hours.
In addition to the above, we must also consider those uses of telemedicine which are already in practice, such as providing support to patients who cannot be moved or who are difficult to reach (such as those patients who live in more isolated rural areas).
As well as the effects of the pandemic, telemedicine also owes its recent increase in popularity to the development of avant-garde technologies and more efficient internet access; nowadays, almost everyone is able to use the internet or get the help of a family member in order to do so.
With the support of high performance, stable telecommunications systems, medicine is able to use the internet to provide a new type of assistance, enabling healthcare to be accessed by patients in almost any location.
The availability of new equipment and sensors which can be used to examine and treat patients non-invasively makes all the difference. The Internet of Medical Things is a subset of the IoT, focusing on the development of devices for tele-monitoring, including items used in daily life such as smartphones, smart watches and fitness bands.
Remote healthcare statistics
The increase in remote healthcare services in Italy is reflected in data gathered by the Digital Healthcare Observatory at the Politecnico, Milan. The numbers speak for themselves, demonstrating a growing interest among all branches of healthcare, whose professionals have finally realised the potential of telemedicine.
Among the most significant variations are:
- The tele-consultation, used by 21% of specialist doctors before the pandemic, is now used by 47%;
- The tele-examination, previously used by a mere 10% of healthcare professionals, has today risen to 39%;
- Tele-monitoring, used by 13% of doctors in the past, has now reached 28%.
Estimates of the future scale of the implementation of telemedicine show the intention of healthcare organisations to use it more widely: 86% of GPs have declared that they will include tele-consultations and 81% of specialists. Furthermore, 82% of GPs have indicated that they will introduce tele-monitoring, compared to just 64% of specialists.
However, patients who use remote healthcare still have some doubts. The main reason for this is perhaps the mind-set of older people who are less inclined to trust technology. In any case, with the right information and awareness campaigns, it will be possible to make people more aware of these services and of their true efficiency.
Translated by Joanne Beckwith
