Telemedicine's Role in Pandemic Response and Control Measures

Telemedicine's Role in Pandemic Response and Control Measures

Sabakun Naher Shetu, Takrima Jannat
DOI: 10.4018/IJARPHM.309410
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Abstract

The COVID-19 pandemic outbreak has changed the conventional method of interacting with healthcare personnel. The rapid adaptation of telemedicine facilities has commuted alternative medical facilities in emergency circumstances. The physicians, nurses, and patients all are adopting telemedicine rapidly under this COVID-19 health system pressure. The reduction of PPE usage increases in video consultations is the positive result of using telemedicine. Nevertheless, front-liners also confront some challenges of using telemedicine including proper infrastructure facilities, lack of physical examination, patient's privacy, and proper diagnosis. Telemedicine-specific legislation must be implemented to ensure patient digital security and set appropriate prices for e-health treatment. These simple e-health technologies may allow infected COVID-19 patients to communicate with one another and acquire relevant health information more readily, resulting in a higher quality of life and better mental health.
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Introduction

The World Health Organization (WHO) declared the coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) outbreak as a pandemic on March 11, 2020, with over 720,000 cases reported in more than 203 countries as of March 31 (Ohannessian, Duong, & Odone, 2020). In the COVID-19 pandemic, the healthcare sector faces the most significant challenges in providing basic medical facilities to the patients while minimizing virus exposure among staff and patients without COVID-19 (Safaeinili et al., 2021). Telemedicine can be used as a potential solution to furnish the medical facilities, which were also utilized in response to Ebola, SARS, and H1N1 outbreaks (Ohannessian, 2015), and now the world is experiencing another global pandemic the COVID-19 (Hollander & Carr, 2020; Ohannessian et al., 2020). The COVID-19 outbreak is disrupting the routine care for non-COVID-19 patients (Ohannessian et al., 2020), and telemedicine, especially video consultations, has been implanted to reduce the risk of transmission in the United Kingdom (Greenhalgh, Wherton, Shaw, & Morrison, 2020), the United States (Hollander & Carr, 2020), and China (Li et al., 2020). The best practice for implementing telemedicine is to increase the remote access that expands the horizon of virtual healthcare services (Young et al., 2019). The researchers suggested integrating telemedicine services in the health care systems to perform the routine hospital patients efficiently may be mitigated the COVID-19 widespread infection (Hur & Chang, 2020; Jnr, 2020).

In the context of the COVID-19 outbreak, where worldwide the nations were trying to integrate telemedicine services into the health care system the contrary surprisingly, Italy, the second-largest burden of COVID-19, does not include telemedicine in their National Health Service. Until an open call for telemedicine and monitoring system technologies proposal was jointly issued by the Ministry for Technological Innovation and Digitalization, the Ministry of Health, the National Institute of Health, and the WHO (Ohannessian et al., 2020). The recent study findings also addressed that no standard input was given on telemedicine by health authorities, despite high pressure on health services during the first phase of the epidemic in Italy (Paterlini, 2020; Remuzzi & Remuzzi, 2020). In response to the global public health crisis, the health systems worldwide have shifted speedily to contrivance telemedicine in divergent settings (Hong et al., 2020; Jnr, 2021; Mann, Chen, Chunara, Testa, & Nov 2020; Ohannessian et al., 2020; Turer, Jones, Rosenbloom, Slovis, & Ward, 2020). The recent literature addressed the lack of a regulatory framework to authorize, integrate, and reimburse telemedicine in their care delivery for all patients, especially in crisis and upsurge circumstances (Smith et al., 2020).

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