While the benefits of telehealth were evident once it appeared on the tech market, some hospitals felt overwhelmed about adopting it. But when everything has been forced online due to the novel coronavirus, telemedicine video conferencing started to act as a driver of delivering the right care at the right time.
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Increasing care outreach
Online consultations help hospitals significantly improve care availability, while solving clinical, demographic, and organizational challenges. Namely, such technology-supported consulting spares the need to travel for various categories of patients. Among them are people living in remote areas, patients with difficulties while moving, older people who have no carer, women in pregnancy, and more.
The purposes of using telemedicine technology also vary:
- Preliminary orientation
- Follow-up care
- Counselling and mental health consultations
- Post-treatment surveillance
Moreover, besides these far-reaching benefits, telemedicine conferencing gets down to zero the risk of hospital-acquired infection, which is particularly important in the pandemic world.
Improving diagnostics and treatment
Collaboration power always brings great results, and the healthcare sphere is no exception. No matter if patients receive online help or get face-to-face consultations, telehealth conferencing has the potential to bost doctor collaboration.
Underpinned by capabilities such as secure video calls as well as quick sharing of medical images, lab results, and clinical notes, physicians can not only easily share knowledge and consult one another before making referrals, but also make more informed decisions on diagnostics and treatment.
Surgery planning is another area where video conferencing finds its fit. With functionality like co-browsing, screen sharing, and virtual whiteboarding, surgeons can work collaboratively to solve the most complicated clinical cases.
Providing high-quality emergency help
Considering specific manipulations that have to be done with a patient at a particular moment, emergency care is generally provided face to face. However, when it comes to mental problems, distant care might be a way out. Mental health check-ups, therapy sessions, one-off advice, tranquilizer refills — all this can be done in a time-consuming way online.
Moreover, patients might urgently need prescription refills, and an online consultation can easily solve this issue. Thus, patients are spared the need to go back to their doctor, which saves them time and nerves.
In addition, the query for distributing emergency help online becomes twice more important and useful during recurring lockdowns and in case of remote areas constraints.
Administering home care
Telemedicine video conferencing contributes a lot into ensuring reliable home care. Empowered with advanced audio and video communication capabilities, physicians can smoothly distribute their work and deliver high-quality patient monitoring related to chronic illnesses, post-traumatic pain, flu, etc.
Besides maintaining the straight contact with patients, healthcare-specific WebRTC solutions help doctors mentor the patient’s relatives — by providing consultations on day-to-day physical care and giving instructions around medicine taking.
Such online visits can also be recorded for further analysis and creation of searchable archives with symptoms, diagnosis, treatment details, recommendations, test results, and more.
Key takeaways
More and more hospitals are approaching technological maturity to improve the care quality. And telemedicine video conferencing helps them take things a step further. Better diagnostics and treatment, healthcare service availability, smooth patient monitoring — these are only some of the benefits WebRTC can give.
