Now that you have some idea of what telehealth is let's talk about a couple of things.
Objective #1
Objective #1
Telehealth is defined as the use of telecommunication technologies to provide health care services and access to medical and surgical information for training and educating health care professionals and consumers, to increase awareness and educate the public about health-related issues, and to facilitate medical research across distances (Mosby's 2009).
Remember when we were taught in nursing school to use all of our senses for part of our assessment of a patient. This was considered basic nursing practice and we were taught to use our noses for smell and hands, to touch a patient's skin to tell if it was warm, dry, cool or clammy?
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How can this be replaced by the current surge into healthcare technology such as telehealth and telemedicine? How can we as nurses remain proactive in the development of nursing practice and continue to integrate telehealth/medicine solutions? (Peck, 2005). Telehealth is not meant to replace these basic assessment practices, but to enhance the ability to provide care for those patients that are unable to travel to facilities for care. Telehealth is the wave of the future and it has been going on for many years.
Believe it or not nursing has been doing using telehealth services through telephone triage for a long time. We may not have thought of it as telehealth then, but it is considered the forerunner of telemedicine which has supported health care advice when distance separates nursing from patients. Bottom line: telehealth saves money and improves patient care (Peck, 2005).
