Telemedicine and telehealth involve a myriad of remote-health-care technologies and services collectively known as “virtual care,” according to an article on The New Yorker website. Until the current pandemic, virtual care has played a minor role in healthcare.
Now, people are discovering its pros and cons. Like many patients, doctors haven’t been sold on telehealth. In a 2019 survey conducted by the American Medical Association, only one in three specialists expressed full confidence that virtual care would benefit their practice, and only two in five primary-care doctors did.
In addition to telehealth’s diagnostic and therapeutic limitations of seeing patients on a screen, virtual doctors’ visits can actually take longer than in-person ones.
But the pandemic has created boom times for businesses that offer telehealth infrastructure to hospitals and to healthcare providers and make direct-to-consumer telehealth apps.
The Issue is made wore by the fact that rapidly established medical-treatment units that have been built to add hospital capacity, will be using remote-care devices that lack proper protection, according to an article on the Healthcare IT News website.