Advantages and Disadvantages of Telehealth

Telehealth
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Telehealth
Telehealth refers to the use of electronic information tools to support remote clinical healthcare. The practice continues to increase across the world, with health facilities adopting it to cut down the operations costs and increase access to patients. According to Schwamm (2014), the quality of telehealth should not vary based on personal characteristics of the patient o the provider. Instead, it should promote equitable access to quality healthcare. Telehealth has several advantages and disadvantages that either promote its usage or prevent health practitioners from adopting it.
One major pro of telehealth for healthcare providers is that it increases the patient base as the providers are able to see more patients. The quality of telehealth also increases as providers are able to save time and attend to more patients. For example, the invention of digital imaging has given radiologists an opportunity to access medical images more proficiently compared to the radiologic image acquisition (Neville, 2018). Consequently, it leads to better patient outcomes since it is easy to trace all the patients’ details and provide the recommended treatment.
Another advantage of this mode of treatment is that it is highly efficient and effective. As a result, the quality of telehealth keeps increasing because service providers can save costs and invest the amount and time in further research. . However, as more and more people and health facilities continue to embrace telehealth, nurses involved in providing telehealth services should be careful not to violate the federal anti-kick-back and Stark Law statutes. According to the anti-kickback law, providers should not receive compensation on treatment plans that involve the federal health care payer for referrals or rendering any other service where the provider has financial interests.
On the contrary, one of the disadvantages of this mode of treatment risks of patient privacy and jeopardizing the system's security. Patient privacy is protected under several laws, including HIPAA, HITECH, and COPPA (B...