The Pros And Cons Of Telehealth

Telehealth is the broad term that encompasses the use of IT to deliver education, research, and clinical care like E-health, telemedicine, and Radio Frequency Identification (RFID) (Niles, 2021). Telehealth is a growing healthcare trend that is happening in today’s society and looking like it is going to continue in the future. But of course, there is pros and cons to it just like there is pros and cons to everything in the world. The Pros is that it “improves accessibility to convenient healthcare, convenient and efficient healthcare, improved patient care and health outcomes, environmentally friendly, lower costs, culturally appropriate healthcare, and enable telementoring” (Tailby, 2022). The cons are “digital divide, lack of clarity around telehealth policies, guidelines and reimbursement rules, training and equipment requirements, security of personal health data – both real and perceived risks, and fewer in-person visits” (Tailby, 2022).

When COVID-19 pandemic occurred, six more countries started practicing telehealth they were Estonia, Germany, Iceland, Luxembourg, Portugal, and the United States. All countries use the same methods of telehealth, but eight countries started paying for teleconsultation through government/compulsory schemes, and eight countries begun paying for remote patient monitoring service through government/compulsory schemes. Telehealth is still growing in the United States due to it still being new. It is stated that “the number of Medicare fee-for-service beneficiary telehealth visits in the U.S. increased 63-fold in 2020, to nearly 52.7 million” (The future…, n.d.). In addition is said that almost 50% of doctors in Denmark and Spain consultations provided in 2020 were teleconsultations (The future…,