Telemedicine and Convenient Healthcare
By Jason Dela Rosa, mediXserve co-founder and COO
It is flu season — this means that most of us will have to go through the arduous task of getting our flu shots. How many of us have experienced waiting for hours outside the doctor’s clinic to get a flu shot or watch half of our day pass us by for a 5-minute consultation?
A study done in 2013 by M.O. Ocher and H. Adamu pointed out that the amount of time a patient waits to be seen by a healthcare professional can be one of the barriers to the use of healthcare services. The long waiting time causes unnecessary stress for both patient and healthcare professional. It discourages patients from doing initial consultations with their doctors; more so when it comes to doing follow-up consultations.
Let us imagine that after consulting with your doctor it turns out that you do not have the flu but have streptococcal or upper respiratory infection and were then given a prescription for antibiotics. What is the next step? You would then have to wait inline at the pharmacy. You have to wait again for staff to appear and see how long the line is.
Telemedicine solves these issues by allowing patients to do follow-up consultations and get e-prescriptions in the comfort of their own home.
The Evolution of Telemedicine
How did telemedicine come about? To put this into perspective, let us take into account the age-old proverb that says “necessity is the mother of inventions” as it highlights the all too human tendency to find ways of getting what we need by any means possible. Someone out there, in this case a pilgrim, might have contracted a disease typical of the era, in one of the nearby colonies, and the doctor — who is sometimes also a priest — might be in another colony making his rounds. The patient had to find a way to reach the doctor and let him know what’s going on through letters or by word of mouth. Tele is a Greek term that means “distant,” especially transmission over a distance, and combined with the word medicine it paints a picture of what telemedicine is all about.
To quote descriptions of a book written in 2010 by Bashhur and Shannon entitled History of Telemedicine: Evolution, Context, and Transformation: “The journey started with ancient societies and the early attempts to establish communication connectivity between settlements when faced with internal or external threats and subsequently to establish clinical connectivity between patient and physician, caregiver, and or priest.”
In the 1950s, a few hospital systems and university medical centers started looking for ways to share information and images via telephone. One succeeded and two health centers in Pennsylvania, USA were able to transmit radiologic images over the phone. However, through the following years, the equipment needed to conduct remote visits remained expensive and complicated to use, and so the growth of telemedicine was limited.
In modern times, telemedicine have done a lot for our convenience. It has allowed healthcare professionals to evaluate, diagnose, and treat patients, with a limited accuracy and proficiency, at a distance. Using telecommunications technology, the approach has revolutionized the way we receive healthcare.
Telemedicine helps those who are far from hospitals or health facilities in obtaining a semblance of health care and by making their medical records accessible through EMR, doctors will be able to make better healthcare decisions and give proper diagnosis as well as advise, as in the case of our product mediXconcierge.
Convenience in the Palm of Your Hand
Statista.com estimates that by 2018, 72.6 million Filipinos will own smart phones. As the bandwidth and technology becomes cheaper and better, the more accessible telemedicine becomes, and the more accepted it would be. Social media platforms like Skype or FB Messenger do not only improve the communication among families, friends, and associates; they also improve the way we connect with our doctors and healthcare professionals.
In the metro, there is no shortage of healthcare professionals who cater to specific health concerns, however the lifestyle of city dwellers makes them perfect for telemedicine. These are people who want to save time going to clinics. These people consist of working parents whose children get sick in the middle of the night.
Telemedicine also allows easy access to healthcare for those in the rural areas, for people with disabilities, senior citizens, and even those who work and live overseas.
Indeed, telemedicine addresses most of our ever-growing healthcare problems in a massive way and we can only look to the future to see how far it will go in solving global health care issues.
