Online Nephrologist | Telemedicine Singapore

Telehealth is the use of digital and telecommunications technology to access healthcare services remotely. It’s a marriage of medicine and technology. It allows patients to consult doctors virtually. Doctors can then diagnose conditions and prescribe treatments for healthcare systems. It’s a way of doing more with less.

When telehealth was first created, it was really to treat patients in remote places. Far away from local health facilities where medical professionals were a shortage. But it is still used today to connect both the patients to the doctors as awareness is required to receive non urgent immediate care, as well as follow up care for both specialists and primary physicians.

One of the biggest challenges in health care across Asia is the lack of enough trained clinicians to treat the broader population at an affordable cost. So telehealth provides an opportunity to amplify the capacity of clinicians and health care networks to provide access to healthcare to a large number of patients.

Telemedicine has been used in the medical sector for a number of years now. But when the covid 19 pandemic hit, social distancing became the new normal. And people around the world turned online, including when they needed to see a doctor.

Heavy crises certainly accelerate telehealth as it provides no real opportunity to link patients with expert clinicians without the need for travel or physical contact and that increases the capacity of clinicians and obviously reduces the risk of infection.

So I think what has happened with COVID-19 is that he has removed that behavioral and economic barrier for a more widespread adoption of telemedicine.

Before the pandemic Asian consumers were already open to the concept of telehealth. In one survey, 78% said that they were ready to use digital healthcare compared to 66% of consumers globally. When the pandemic hit, telemedicine apps in many markets saw big spikes in demand.

Many of our Asian markets are embracing digital both digital health tools and telemedicine. In particular, we really saw telemedicine start to take off in China with the initial outbreak there. So China managed to move at least 50% of medical care to being online in those early days of the outbreak, and that really changed the dynamic of healthcare and added additional services that just weren’t there before.

According to the World Health Organization, 58% of countries surveyed are now using telemedicine to replace in person consultations. The majority also use telemedicine to triage patients to determine the severity of illness. But while such digital solutions are seen as safe and convenient, particularly during a pandemic, telemedicine does have its limitations.

The biggest contributing factors for the lack of adoption is probably the skepticism of online diagnosis. But it’s important also to sort of highlight that when the doctors are providing services using tellement modalities, they must ensure that they are providing the same quality and standard of care.

The outcomes for patients are not inferior to standard care. And that’s because you have to make sure you’ve got to have the right patients for this program. Not everybody can benefit from health, health if they’ve got significant acute illnesses that need constant monitoring and review and lab tests done daily for example, not necessarily beneficial to have it done via telemedicine. Having said that, the largest segment of patients who basically do relatively well from day to day, but suffer from chronic diseases that require regular monitoring and prevention of deterioration or reducing the risk of complications. These tend to be very easily managed via telemedicine.

As with any digital platform, there are also concerns over data protection and privacy.

Individual consumers obviously want to be assured that their personal record can be kept secure. But really the whole system has to be embracing the highest standards of data protection and privacy for all individuals. And I think with most things digital and healthcare is no exception. You know, the pace of change actually outpaces our ability to regulate and governance in some instances.

Industry watchers say that the covid 19 pandemic could radically change the telemedicine sector and its role in healthcare systems around the world.

Everyone’s looking at that now to figure out how we can sustain this momentum. What we need to do now is to ensure that we can demonstrate very clear benefits to rolling out telehealth across the right patient in the Right Sector, and that will demonstrate them to the payers and to providers that this can be a viable alternative to face to face care.

A big part of the new normal will be the increasing role played by online platforms and the expansion of telehealth will be part of a global trend in the digitization of healthcare.

The future of healthcare is certainly digital. So the increase that we’ve seen in telemedicine has to a large extent been forced upon people because of you know, lockdowns and confinements but it’s not going away. So what we do know is that once individual consumers start using digital tools, including digital healthcare tools, they continue using them.

I don’t think we’re going to be moving to fully virtual hospitals where everybody’s treated remotely in their homes anytime soon. But, you know, there’s a clear opportunity to extend the reach to the vulnerable people or people in remote populations and that helps to increase the effectiveness and the efficiency of clinicians throughout the healthcare system.