The Future of Telemedicine: Post-Pandemic Expectations

How the Virus Woken Up Telemedicine

The COVID-19 pandemic let people see telemedicine in another light and triggered its faster implementation around the world. Before the coronavirus outbreak, over 80% of Americans claimed distrust for remote medical care. Now, the US actively promotes telemedicine because the number of people infected with the disease there is the highest in the world.

The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and the World Health Organization support the concept of telemedicine and considers it a way to reduce the morbidity rate. Remote doctor care works best for people with low or medium-intensity symptoms, while severe cases are subject to hospital treatment. The pandemic helped the world realize all the benefits of telemedicine, namely:

• No need for leaving home. Hospitals got full of infected patients, so going to a hospital can be dangerous for anyone. By visiting doctors online, people with suspected diseases don’t put others in danger.

• No risk for patients with chronic conditions. Any unknown infection may cause complications for patients with chronic diseases. Telemedicine allows people with such conditions to get elective care remotely and don’t get affected by infections.

• No risk for doctors. In the time of the pandemic, health care workers are least protected. While doctors are at risk, the healthcare system is vulnerable as well. Some of them get infected by patients, while others must self-isolate after contact with people who have confirmed diagnosis. By providing medical advice remotely, doctors aren’t exposed to various diseases.

What to Expect after Pandemic

Healthcare companies and institutions are likely to adopt more advanced technologies and equipment to provide quality care for a larger number of people than now. Specialists have high hopes about artificial intelligence, and these hopes are about to come true. In this part, we explain how technologies will improve telemedicine in various ways after the pandemic.

Advanced Health Monitoring

Technologies can significantly improve the monitoring of patients in critical condition. Specialists develop analyzers to display patients’ body temperature and heart rate, on distance. Artificial intelligence can already use patient data to predict changes in their condition faster than a human specialist. When the doctor cannot examine the patient right away, a remote monitoring system will be activated to set a treatment plan.

Doctor on Demand, one of the most popular telemedicine apps, improves day-by-day, and offers patients to take free COVID risk assessment tests. This app can also forward patients with a high risk of any severe disease to a call with a competent physician automatically.

Improved Doctor-to-Doctor Interaction

Telemedicine will ensure high-quality information exchange between different doctors in and out of hospitals. It already allows remote physicians to help the colleagues who work directly in the emergency rooms. As an example, one of the Philips solutions offers high-resolution cameras, telemetry, predictive analytics, data visualization, and automatic reporting. Specific algorithms monitor when patients’ can get worse. Thus, specialists can react more quickly in critical situations and cooperate to solve them.

Instead of radiology, hospitals can adopt teleradiology to minimize contacts between doctors. The world has already seen platforms that collect and process all medical images across districts and cities. Such platforms have a single storage, in which all mammography, CT, MRI, and other images are kept. They also allow physicians to communicate and get remote help from their colleagues. It’s essential when a single specialist has doubts about the supposed diagnosis and must reach out to other specialists while isolated.

More Efficient Diagnostics

We can expect faster patient diagnostics and machine-generated treatment plans. When the focus of the epidemic was in Wuhan, China, local hospitals used an AI app to recognize COVID-19-based pneumonia on lung CT scans. It helped to screen patients and prioritize the treatment of those who have evident pneumonia symptoms. This solution didn’t make diagnoses itself, but it helped doctors do it faster. Still, the improvements in diagnostics have yet to come.

Convenient Workload for Doctors

With distant monitoring and higher quality of features in various medical equipment, doctors will focus more on the treatment. They won’t be loaded with too many undiagnosed patients. Besides, more experienced doctors will be able to assist their colleagues remotely, even in critical situations. The medical stuff’s lives will always be stressful, but the machines can take away a part of their stress.

Legal Side of Telemedicine

There are still some issues with providing medical care via telemedicine internationally. Coronavirus was the reason for many countries to start adopting laws allowing remote doctor care. The legislature in each country must define ways of reimbursement for such services and cover responsibilities for unexpected outcomes. The legal side of using telemedicine isn’t perfect yet, so people around the world should study current legislation carefully.

Conclusion

Many people have realized the importance of telemedicine just recently. The pandemic caused innovative ideas and strategies to appear. Healthcare and technology specialists already test many of them. The world expects higher digitalization of medicine. People will use apps and machines to get medical advice or a prescription. Drones will deliver drugs to patients. Chatbots will check symptoms and provide treatment plans when doctors won’t be able to do it immediately. New working methods will appear to make doctors’ experience safe and convenient. For instance, China already tests an ultrasound technique performed by robots.