How Telemedicine is Used on the Frontlines of COVID-19?

Telemedicine or e-health system is one of the today’s most important inventions. It revolutionizes the delivery of healthcare services in the world. Today is the right time to demonstrate the potential of digital health technology in managing the newest pandemic in our world.

Today is the right time to demonstrate the potential of digital health technology in managing the newest pandemic in our world. The White House Office of science and technology policy has called for help from technology companies to take action in the science community. On the frontlines of the pandemic, scientists have been getting benefits from digital mechanisms to communicate with patients and track the spread of the disease.

A very good use of digital health technology on the frontline of the virus is collecting resources from all over the world to be shown at one time. Not only this, scientists are working on finding cures and drugs according to all of the available technologies and skills.

Telemedicine approaches such as videocall, e-mail, mobile applications and websites enable patients to be treated remotely because the responses will be in real time, but the question is, can telemedicine approaches contribute in treating patients who got the virus? In fact, such cases can’t be diagnosed through internet due to the need of blood test, but patients can get selfcare advices from doctors and health care providers. In cases where patients notice the signs of the virus on themselves, they will be advised to have a checkup in hospital.

This way of getting selfcare advices is not very much trustable due to getting personal data from patients and recording them automatically. Ethical issues are involved in this area between medicine and information technology. Vulnerability of applications and technological devices of being hacked is much higher than our expectations because patients’ private information including images, address, phone number and type of disease are about to be transmitted between systems.

Telemedicine security involves a bunch of problems in field of authorization, authentication. Patients should be able to trust reliability of the systems in order to support the relationship between them and the health care providers. Otherwise, telemedicine won’t have crucial effects and won’t get widely acceptable.

What it is left to mention is that telemedicine has not become the most trustable and approachable way of treating patients till now. In the end we have to consider that technology has not become acceptable widely yet because of security concerns! But we as people who work in the field of information technology, have to make great efforts to improve this type of treating patients because it serves the humanity and medicine.