What is Difference between Telehealth and Telemedicine ? .
In recent years, there has been several advancements in the medical field and with such, innovations have been made to carter for the changes. According to (Bitar & Alismail, 2021) these innovations are supposed to improve patient care, health surveillance, health education and make research easier. Such innovations include the use of information and communication technology (ICT) to support long distance healthcare. The purpose of this paper is to differentiate between telehealth and telemedicine.
Telehealth is the use of virtual devices to pass across information and to offer care to the patients. Telemedicine on the other hand is the practice of medicine through remote electronic interface therefore telehealth is considered as a broader concept of telemedicine. While these two might seem identical, telehealth is different from telemedicine because it denotes to a wider scope of remote healthcare services. Telemedicine is only concerned with remote clinical services while telehealth deals with both clinical and non clinal services of patient care(Mechanic et al., 2022). Examples of telehealth include, video conferencing, remote patient monitoring and mobile apps while examples of telemedicine include live consultations, medical imaging, remote diagnosis and evaluation of patients.
The benefits of telehealth include; saves on time, gives the patient an easier access to a consultant and minimizes on unnecessary admissions (Gajarawala & Pelkowski, 2021) while its limitations are linked to the fact the internet access is required, patient assessment is limited and a patients personal and confidential information might be leaked incase of system malfunctioning. Telemed on the other hand enhances patient doctor relationship, facilitates access to patients in remote areas thus proving to be cost effective and also the saves the time of both the patient and the healthcare provider. Disadvantages of telemed include difficult transition from traditional practices, ICT illiteracy, cultural and language barriers between patients and healthcare workers.
References.
Bitar, H., & Alismail, S. (2021). The role of eHealth, telehealth, and telemedicine for chronic disease patients during COVID-19 pandemic: A rapid systematic review. Digital Health, 7, 20552076211009396. https://doi.org/10.1177/20552076211009396
Gajarawala, S. N., & Pelkowski, J. N. (2021). Telehealth Benefits and Barriers. The Journal for Nurse Practitioners: JNP, 17(2), 218–221. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.nurpra.2020.09.013
Mechanic, O. J., Persaud, Y., & Kimball, A. B. (2022). Telehealth Systems. In StatPearls. StatPearls Publishing. http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/books/NBK459384/