What is Telehealth

What Is Telehealth Video

Telehealth is the use of telecommunications, health information, and videoconferencing technologies to deliver medical care, health education, and public health services, by connecting multiple users in separate locations.

Telehealth encompasses a broad definition of technology-enabled health care services. This definition includes telemedicine, which is the diagnosis and treatment of illness or injury. Telehealth services consist of diagnosis, treatment, assessment, monitoring, communications, and education.

How Telehealth Works

Telehealth medical services are delivered in three main ways:

Video conferencing, which is used for real-time patient-provider consultations, provider-to-provider discussions, and language translation services.
Patient monitoring, in which electronic devices transmit patient health information to health care providers.
Store & forward technologies, which electronically transmit pre-recorded videos and digital images, such as X-rays, video clips and photos, between primary care providers and medical specialists.

Health education includes a broad range of activities, such as classes, patient portals and online discussion forums for patients, and training programs for all levels of health professionals. These services can be live, interactive video, with multiple users communicating in real time, or pre-recorded, on-demand video streaming that can be downloaded to computers or digital devices.

Public health services include disaster management systems, which can expand the capacity of local emergency medical providers, and pandemic/epidemic public communications activities.

Telehealth technologies can be transmitted a number of different ways. These include:

Encrypted Internet connections.
Major broadband networks, such as the California Telehealth Network, which provide dedicated circuits for network users. These networks deliver secure, private data transmission, explicit quality of service, and prioritization of emergency medical communications. They allow all network users to connect with each other, and to connect with non-network users via the public Internet. These networks involve large numbers of users, and can be easily expanded to accommodate new users.
High-speed telecommunications lines, which allow dedicated, secure connections to other sites with similar connectivity.
Private point-to-point broadband connections, which provide secure transmissions, but unlike broadband networks, connect specific facilities to one another.
Patient monitoring centers, which receive transmissions from at-home and other remote measurement devices.
Single-line telephone and video lines, which connect providers with patients at home.

Why Is Telehealth Important?

Telehealth technologies are valuable tools that can improve health outcomes and access to care, and make health care delivery systems more efficient and cost-effective. Telehealth can deliver important medical services where they are needed most, and remove barriers of time, distance, and provider scarcities. This includes remote, rural areas and medically underserved urban communities.

The United States has the ability to provide some of the best medical care in the world. However, while U.S. health spending is significantly higher than that of other industrialized countries, a growing body of evidence indicates that the quality of medical care in the United States often falls short.

The quality of medical care varies widely, and in many instances is delivered in disjointed, poorly coordinated fashion. This drives up costs, and puts patients needlessly at risk. Improving the performance of the U.S. health care system is a matter of national urgency.

Telehealth technologies have been shown to boost access to care, improve patient safety and quality of care, and save money.

For example:

A 2003 study examined a major rural telehealth network, which provided patient monitoring and video conferencing services for 10 different types of medical, dental and behavioral health care. The study found substantive improvements in health outcomes and disease management among patients with diabetes and congestive heart failure, increased use of specialty dental care, and substantially reduced response times for psychiatric crisis evaluations. Based on the network’s outcomes, the study projected that for congestive heart failure alone, comprehensive telehealth intervention could reduce hospitalization costs nationwide from $8 billion a year to $4.2 billion a year.
The California Teleopthalmology Network links 13 rural health clinics with the University of California, Berkeley School of Optometry, delivering eye screenings for diabetic retinopathy, a major cause of blindness among diabetics, to thousands of low-income patients in California's Central Valley.
In 2004-05, the California Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation provided 9,100 telehealth consultations for inmates, saving taxpayers roughly $4 million in transportation and security costs.
A 2010 report by the Federal Communications Commission estimated that remote patient monitoring for heart disease, diabetes, pulmonary disease and skin disease could save $197 billion nationwide over 25 years.