Advantages Of Telehealth

Nursing Practice Through Telehealth
Ongoing demands for effective and affordable medical care challenge the healthcare providers to search new approaches to patients’ care. One of that challenges is to provide high quality and patient-centered care to underserved populations who do not have access to healthcare due to geographical or socioeconomic reasons. According to Fathi (2017), continues development and improvement of communication and technology, as well as a need to address health disparities demands, positions nurses to practice through telehealth technologies. Telehealth is a progressively developing trend in the healthcare that enables healthcare providers to provide a care when distance separates them from their patients (Fathi,

One of the most positive aspects of telehealth is its convenience. The patient can receive healthcare services from home, a workplace, or any convenient local site without geographic and transportation limitation. For example, telehealth is successfully utilized in the psychiatric field. Telepsychiatry is a psychiatric care by means of smartphone wherein the healthcare provider can deliver a psychiatric care to the patient that has conditions like agoraphobia which often isolate patients and prevent access to psychiatric care (Fathi, Modin, &Scott, 2017). Another advantage of telehealth is an involvement of the patients in their own treatments. According to Wilson (2017), “Engaging patients in their own self-care is an important foundation of successful population health management. Patient portals, mobile apps, and telehealth/telemedicine can promote this engagement.” In the future, progressively developing telehealth technologies will promote patients’ better awareness of their own disease process, monitoring, and

Telehealth services provided through the internet are vulnerable to hackers and other security breaches, therefore healthcare providers must take extra protection to ensure patient health information security (Fathi, Modin, &Scott, 2017). Another disadvantage of telehealth is poor personal patient-provider relationship. With telehealth technology, a patient often does not get a chance to bond with a healthcare provider because of lack of face-to face communication. This kind of gap in the relationship can lead to a patient’s poor health outcome. Finally, there may also be issues with inadequate assessment. Certain types of diseases require personal physical assessment and cannot be diagnosed through