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Telehealth is here to Stay
And local public health authorities must seize the opportunities to reach broader publics
At the height of the COVID-19 pandemic, both public and private health facilities around the country implemented some form of telehealth service to provide health diagnosis and advise to patients who were restricted from traveling. Mostly in the form of mobile online video conferencing, SMS, chat, or traditional phone/mobile call services, teleconsult became the “new normal” especially for senior citizens and differently-abled persons.
Beyond Consultation
But while online consultations proved useful and helped avert health emergencies, they can only do so much. Heavily dependent on the patient’s self-assessments or personal observations as well as the health care provider’s keen perception in detecting underlying medical conditions, teleconsultations are limited by access to actual and measured vital health indicators.
In most cases, teleconsultations will still require patients to submit to a physical diagnostic test from a third-party provider and then submit the results to the remote teleconsulting physician.
In the Philippines, however, particularly in the rural countryside, diagnostic centers are located in urban or peri-urban centers – mostly ten or so kilometers away from rural villages.
In addition, most diagnostic centers are privately managed and charge somewhere in between PHP1,500.00 – PHP3,000.00 for basic physical examinations which includes a Chest x-ray, simple blood tests and urine and fecal tests.
En Vogue: Hospitals-On-Wheels
To provide responsive public health care to residents in geographically remote and disadvantaged areas, many local government units around the Philippines have began investing in mobile diagnostic vans that go around visiting far-flung villages to provide free tests and other medical services. These are a step in the right direction and can greatly benefit constituents.
But hospitals-on-wheels are not without their own unique disadvantages.
Not only are mobile diagnostic vans or hospitals-on-wheels expensive and are beyond the budgetary reach of small local government units, they also require additional investments to manpower as well as the regular maintenance and operating expenses of the vehicle including the equipment, devices, and consumables they carry to administer the health care procedures.
In many instances, mobile diagnostic vans travel to a central accessible area in a remote village and residents from farther locations go there to avail of the services, often lining up for an entire day. With other locations to service, mobile diagnostic vans are likewise limited by schedule and would only limit the number of people in each visit.
Activating Digitally Enabled Care
As public and private health care facilities resume full operations, the future of telehealth services lies beyond virtually mediated consultations. And with the appropriate technology, telemedicine can close the gaps in delivering public health services especially to geographically disadvantaged areas that emerging interventions such as mobile diagnostic vans are unable to fully address.
This entails a deeper form of digitalized health care that extends the presence of a limited number of medical experts through equipment and devices that are not only connected but are able to store and transmit the information needed by both health care practitioners and patients.
Digitally enabled health care not only brings health services much closer to the people who need them. It also increases and enhances public confidence in public health authorities while simultaneously empowering community-based health workers such as Barangay Health Workers, Barangay Nutrition Scholars, Child Development Workers, and similar local government health staff. Equipping local health care workers with technology and the proper training for their use establishes a sustained presence in communities that would otherwise only encounter doctors and nurses every so often.
One Top Partners with SK Telemed to Equip Philippine Health Care Facilities with Cutting Edge Telehealth Technology
In response to the foreseeable sustained demand for telehealth services in the country, One Top Medical Systems Resources has partnered with SK Telemed in exclusively distributing the IDIS2GO telehealth technology in the Philippines.
A telehealth medical diagnostic system, IDIS2GO performs remote collection, transmission and storage of medical information about the patient’s physiological parameters and vital signs.
Hosted through an open platform that can be accessed by physicians remotely, IDIS2GO enables high quality examination at any patient location: at home, in rural area, or hospitals.