Telemedicine And Telehealth: A Case Study

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The topic chosen was the impact of Telemedicine and Telehealth on the quality of care and health care costs. Telemedicine, or Telehealth, uses information and communication technologies to facilitate long-distance health care, public health, patient education and administration, and health administration. It may be as simple as enhancing communication between health care professionals and patients, or as complex as the use of technology and robots to facilitate surgery. While there has been a lot of research on the general impact of telemedicine or telehealth on the quality of care and health care costs, further research is needed on rigorous cost benefit analysis, long-term evaluation studies and contrasting assessment methods, generalizability …show more content…
Randomized control trials are the standard for the examination of costs and benefits because they allow for the recognition of outcomes solely attributable to the program under review by comparing the difference in outcomes of the defined treatment and control groups. Some of the researchers used randomized control trials but the sample sizes were small. Not using randomized control trials might have created biases. Journals that publish research on telemedicine or telehealth ought to set the bar high for the quality in methods utilized so that decision makers on coverage of these services do not have to rely on research with sub par methodologies. Another gap in the research on telemedicine and telehealth is that is it cannot be generalized. Most of the researches conducted are on a particular medical specialty, application, and technology or in special geographic locations. This makes it difficult to generalize the results for economic evaluation. The greater parts of the studies explore one particular type of telemedicine or telehealth program example, teledermatology or telepsychiatry. The problem is that though these programs are benefiting these areas of expertise, they do not have the range essential to smooth the process of extensive