REMOTE TREATMENT: HOW TELEMEDICINE WORKS
Distance medicine – for whom?
The global goal of telemedicine is to provide patients with access to care wherever they are. It doesn’t matter if there is a specialist at a certain level in the district clinic – you can go to any doctor in another city and even in another country.
Officials have another hope for her – to unload the clinics, reduce the flow of patients.
Doctors see an opportunity to often gather consultations with colleagues and closely monitor the health of patients.
And the patients themselves present an ideal picture in which doctors will not need to go at all – to be treated from home.
In fact, telemedicine is trying to solve all these problems – expand access to medical services and highly specialized care, reduce the number of visits to clinics and partially transfer the interaction between the doctor and the patient online.
In Russia, telemedicine operates with a number of rules and restrictions: two main ones – you cannot remotely make a diagnosis and prescribe treatment.
Check
Suppose you visited a doctor, got a diagnosis and a number of recommendations, but something in the prescribed treatment is alarming. Then you choose another doctor and, in order to save time and money, consult with him online. He either confirms the diagnosis or finds defects in it and adjusts the treatment.
Decryption
An even more frequent case is a transcript of analyzes, especially those that are for preventive purposes. In order not to rack your brains, you have enough iron in your blood or not, studying mysterious notations, you can consult online by sending a copy of the tests to your doctor.
Secondary reception
The service is becoming popular among patients at state clinics. You probably know this situation: you stayed on sick leave with a cold or ODS, fulfilled all the doctor’s recommendations, recovered and are ready to go to work, but you need to spend half a day, go to the clinic again. Now you can close the sick leave online, the doctor will make sure that you have really recovered, and will draw up all the documents.
Monitoring
For patients with chronic diseases who constantly monitor health indicators, telemedicine is real salvation. Of course, you will need to connect the equipment, choose, for example, a tonometer that transfers data to a smartphone, but then you don’t have to go to the doctor as a job – all control will be carried out remotely.