Telemedicine as a Fixture of Healthcare Landscape

Abstract

Telemedicine involves electronic and telecommunication methods in healthcare systems. It is widely incorporated for the purpose of diagnosis, treatment, evaluation and research. There is a subtle difference between telemedicine and telehealth where the latter is not only specific to clinical settings but also non-clinical services. Telemedicine has grown rapidly due to the Covid-19 pandemic. This growth has proven to be a breakthrough for more inventions of telemedicine in future. Incorporation of telemedicine in healthcare settings have proven to be advantageous and disadvantageous and this leaves room for more improvements towards the system in future. Some advantages of health information technology include facilitating effective communication between doctors, nurses and pharmacists making coordination effective. Information is stored precisely in software making it easy to recover during routine follow-ups. By disease surveillance and monitoring, medication efficacy has also been improved. Telemedicine has been applied in radiology practises, psychiatry fields and even in the monitoring of chronic diseases. Telemedicine has risen rapidly due to pandemics and is still expected to evolve in the near future. This literature review was done using articles published between 2006 and 2022 found via search engines like PubMed, Google Scholar, SpringerLink, ClinicalKey and ScienceDirect. Other information and data relevant to our topic were obtained from websites of professional organisations. The keywords used include “telemedicine”, “advantages'', “limitations”, “applications”, “Covid-19”, “development” and “future”.