Technologies have made it easier for advancements in health care and communication. However this advancement is not beneficial to everyone since some people live in a very remote place. Telemedicine provides a lot of benefits such as life-saving treatment in remote places, self-sustain healthcare, fast communication with the doctors, and don’t have to travel vast distance to get help. Project operation village health and project Tanzania can show a lot the benefit that telemedicine provide. This essay will compare the two projects and their benefits.
Cambodia is still a developing country with a lot of rural areas that are very remote: this is the same for Tanzania as well. A lot of those areas have tough terrain, huge jungle, and very
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Also people are healthier since clinicians at the other side of the world have been educating a lot about prevention of sicknesses and how to stay clean.
Telemedicine provides a lot of benefits for doctors of both countries. For Cambodia operation village health introduced a whole new experience to the local people. They have established internet connection and set up computers for communication between the local doctor and the specialists from Harvard University. The idea is to let the local send images and description of their patient’s sickness condition to the experts to help evaluate and give feed-backs. Then they can start helping their patients when they receive those feed-backs via internet of course. The project also wanted to introduce the digital pens to help ease the text description since the local health workers are having a hard time using keyboards to type (Heinzelman, 2007). The experts that volunteers to help with these projects also get benefits as well. They can learn new things about tropical disease and new experience (Ackerman, 2007). Likewise for Tanzania telemedicine is use to consult experts through the internet. Not only have that but the expert also helped to train the native clinicians about the technology and how to treat people. When these native doctors started using this system they generally
To show the deficit of the cultural change within the aspects of healthcare an experiment was performed on two specified hospitals. A collaboration of data was obtained over a 12-month period. It showed that since the introduction of telemedicine there was a reduction of 25.9% in patients being transferred out to other hospitals for neurological evaluations. The full potential of telemedicine will only be realized through change in medical culture and attitudes. In a system of this nature, knowledge sharing took place and established a new paradigm in healthcare delivery (Steinman, Morbeck, Pires, Filho, Andrade, Terra, Junior, & Kanamura).
In this context telemedicine and technological capability can respond to two major strands: the first is a simplification to ensure that with available technologies, all actors of a clinical path from taking care to resign, share real-time Useful information for themselves and for other professionals in order to identify and follow the best path. The second strand is the provision on the territory of technological capacities that are very developed in a hospital environment but whose deployment is quite circumscribed.
Access to applicable health services is often limited for people living in remote areas and for those with restricted mobility. One of the innovative implementation for a sustainable health care system in minimizing this inequality in access is Telehealth services (Bywood, P et.al, 2013). The aim of this study is to analyze the possible challenges encountered during the provision of using advanced telecommunication systems in the health care system.
Telemedicine is the use of telecommunication and information technologies in order to provide clinical health care at a distance. It helps eliminate distance barriers and can improve access to medical services that would often not be consistently available in distant rural communities.
The Telehealth services will include the use of technology to deliver telemedicine. The budget will fund the hospital with videoconferencing software, computers, webcams, and trained employees to set up and document the process. The equipment will allow physicians or patients to consult virtually with other physicians and specialists. Instead of missing a day of work or school and commuting hours for an appointment with a specialist, patients will be able to visit their local hospital and consult with the specialist via technology. Consultations, examinations, and monitoring are services that can easily be provided through
Telemedicine seeks to improve a patient’s health by permitting a two-way communication between the patient, and the physician or practitioner at the distant site.
Improved quality is another benefit of telemedicine. The actual quality of healthcare services being delivered by via telemedicine, are just as good as the quality of care being rendered in traditional in-person consultations, shown in recent studies. Special facilities like mental health and ICU care; telemedicine is known to deliver an excellent product. With telemedicine aiding these special facilities, it creates even greater outcomes, and substantial satisfaction from the patients (americantelemed, 2012). Out of all the benefits that have been listed, the patient’s demand for telemedicine can be one of the biggest benefits of telemedicine. Consumers are really just enjoying telemedicine. Telemedicine greatest impacts are on the patient, their families, and their community. As mentioned earlier, telemedicine patient demand mainly derived from the reduced travel time for a patient. The reduction of travel time and traveling long distances can reduce the overall stress for a patient by
According to American Telemedicine Organization, telemedicine is the use of medical information exchanged from one site to another via electronic communications to improve a patient’s clinical health status. The Rural hospital faces unique challenges delivering quality care and access to specialists.
The delivery of health care has always been influenced by technological developments and innovations. This is particularly true in modern health care professionals where they are obsessed with technology and rush to apply them. One of the most recent applications of ICT – Information and computer technology- is telehealth. Telehealth is the use of communication, diagnostic and information technology to provide health care when patients and providers are geographically separated [2], Technologies include videoconferencing, the internet, store -and-forward imaging, streaming media, terrestrial and wireless communications. Telehealth could be as simple as two health professionals discussing a case over the telephone or as
Often the biggest barriers to accessing healthcare are cost and location. Lower income individuals just do not have the resources to have optimal healthcare, or cannot take the time away from employment to deal with health issues. One potential solution to help with these problems could be “telehealth.” Telehealth allows a lower level healthcare practitioner to communicate with a physician or specialists when necessary. Remote rural areas use a Physician Assistant or a Nurse Practitioner on location in remote areas.
According to a government study, bringing telemedicine to places in sub-Saharan Africa, made-up of 33 of the 48 globally poorest countries, would be vital to the two main branches of healthcare: preventive and emergency, where countries that lack proper infrastructure leave people and communities disease-ridden (Wamala). In some countries, such as Ethiopia and South Africa, there is significant progress in Telemedicine, while in countries such as Burkina Faso and Nigeria the progress is slow because of lack of political support. The study noted that while it is not always practical to have doctors deployed to certain regions where medical need is required, telemedicine and empowering people through video and cellular communication is critical in areas to prevent disease from occurring in the first place, especially in places like the rural poor, where delivering medicine is a
Telemedicine is defined as the use of medical information exchanged from one site to another via electronic communications to improve a patient’s clinical health status (American Telemedicine Association, 2012). Telemedicine includes an expanding assortment of applications and services that take advantage of video, email, smart phone, wireless tools, and other telecommunication technologies. These types
Telemedicine is the practice of medicine in relation to clinical care where medical information is transferred through technological means for the purpose of consulting or conducting medical examinations and procedures from two different locations. Technological means can be as uncomplicated as a phone call between two specialists or more complex with the use of satellite technology to enable equipment for video conferencing, transmission of images and monitoring of vital signs. There is a distinction between telemedicine and telehealth, telehealth is a broader term that does not always refer to clinical services but may also include patient portals, continuing medical education, and nursing call centers.
In order to uphold to these strategies, Ghana launched many health information projects. Plans such as the Mobile Technology for Community Health in Ghana (MOTECH) and Mobile Teledermatology (Afarikumah, 2014) in Ghana concentrates on the topic of telemedicine. MOTECH focuses on prenatal care with an objective towards increasing quality of care for mothers living in rural areas and Mobile Dermatology looks at dermatology situations in outpatient settings without the use of the Internet (Afarikumah, 2014). With Ghana being a developing country, individuals would have very limited access to health care services because of travel barriers or health costs. Telemedicine projects create the effort and space for those individuals to be able to
Telemedicine is the use telecommunications and information technology to provide healthcare to patients located in the remote or distant locations. For example: people staying in the mountainous areas or islands can get medical services right at their home with the help of smart devices or patients who cannot go to the hospital for some reason.