Introduction to Telehealth & How Technology is Changing HealthCare

By the year 2050, there will be approximately 90 million seniors living in the United States, with many of them requiring at home care, as well as other patients needing care at home. New advances in technology are especially important for the caretakers of patents. With this integration, healthcare has become more efficient than it ever has, and has transformed the relationship between patient and healthcare provider.

To realize smooth cooperation between medical care and nursing care, the establishment of a shared network of patient information and the provision of efficient medical service are required. It is the utilization of ICT (information technology) that becomes the key. The advancement of technology including AI, ICT and others is remarkable, and the wave is spreading in the field of medical care. Even in regional medical care and advanced medicine, change has already begun. Research on artificial intelligence (AI) began around 60 years ago, and now it is positioned as a third AI boom where machinery learning and deep learning are attracting attention.

Furthermore, there has been a sharp contrast between the increasing elderly patients and increasing number of retiring nurses. This has caused new technologies to be able to catch up to fill the void left by this gap between nurses and elderly patients. One way that this can be solved is the use of telehealth technologies. Telecommunication is a growing field and its use in healthcare can prove to be indispensable. The use of telehealth will be able to use “a broad variety of technologies and tactics to deliver virtual medical, health, and education services”. The adoption of these technologies would help streamline healthcare and reduce the number of times elderly patients would have to visit a hospital and the “larger share of the care in the patients’ home or residence, potentially reducing the demand for nurses and aides”.

As the number of elderly patients is on the rise of the United States, information technology has been improving to meet the new needs of patients. With accessing the growing field of telecommunications patient care at home is being transformed so that virtual medical services can be used to make home care more efficient for both the patient and the caretaker.