You’ve probably seen me refer to telehealth in a number of blogposts recently. For example, this one about food energetics and this one about ear seeds. You may be wondering, well okay, but what is telehealth? Telehealth (which may also be referred to as telemedicine) is the provision of health-related services and information via electronic information and telecommunication technologies. It allows long distance and/or remote healthcare.
It may seem like a new thing but it’s actually been around for many years. The World Health Organisation traces it back to the mid to late 19th century. It started to really grow around five years ago. This was due to the cost of technology and high speed communication links coming down and making it more accessible. So far it’s primarily been used to connect people in rural and remote areas with healthcare services or to allow greater access to healthcare specialists who can’t spend all their time travelling around. The very recent social distancing has created an absolute necessity for it, even over local distances, over the last few weeks.
Local telehealth
My own doctor’s surgery have increased their telehealth options recently as a way to maintain social distancing. An example of this, is if you find you have a new mole or an older one changes shape (both of which should be checked out), you can email a photo of the mole to the surgery using a secure link that they’ll give you. They will then assess and decide whether they need to see you to investigate further, or they can give you quick reassurance if they believe the mole to be safe . If you do need to see your doctor for any reason, then please phone first to check how they are currently managing appointments. This can change from week to week right now and they may be implementing their own telehealth options.
How good is telehealth?
So just how good is telehealth as an option? This systematic review (the gold standard of research) of patient and caregiver’s satisfaction indicates that “there is consistent evidence that telehealth has an overall positive impact on patient and caregivers’ satisfaction”. A systematic review summarises the results of a number of healthcare studies, in this case 36 of them.
The outcomes of satisfaction with telehealth were categorised into system experience, information sharing, consumer focus and overall satisfaction. There were high levels of satisfaction across all of these. Respondents of questionnaires scored greater than 80% agreement in overall satisfaction. In the semi-structured interviews, 81% of participants reported being satisfied with the telehealth experience. The studies were based on people living in rural and remote areas so their experience may not be ours, but the focus on videoconferencing as the method used, can be directly compared to what we have planned at the clinic.
Telehealth at South Scarborough Acupuncture
Your health, privacy and data security are key concerns for me here at South Scarborough Acupuncture, as we move to embrace telehealth. I’ve been selecting an IT system that can provide end to end encryption of data and meet current GDPR (data protection) regulations as they apply in the UK. There are still some new processes that I need to develop to support the IT but I hope to be opening up telehealth appointments for booking towards the end of next week. In the meantime, if you have any questions about telehealth generally, or about the security of our systems then please feel free to contact me.
I look forward to once again helping you back to better health very soon.
Stay safe, stay well, stay home.