What is Neonatal Telehealth: How It Has Transformed Neonatal Health ?

Giving birth is no small feat and it can often be a very stressful experience for mothers, even more so if they lack access to neonatal care. A lot of birthing facilities tend not to have onsite neonatal care resources, so if the baby is born preterm or with low birth weight, immediate care for the mother and the child is sometimes unavailable.

The worst-case scenario in these conditions can be fatal. In-person assistance and the transportation of babies and the mother to neonatal facilities can be costly for healthcare providers and stressful for the mother and baby.

This is where neonatal telehealth comes in. Healthcare providers can have neonatal specialists be in constant contact with the patient, providing remote consultation for infant care using live video and audio.

What Is Telehealth?

Telemedicine or telehealth is the remote delivery of healthcare services as well as medical information using telecommunication technology. The model for this kind of service is known as a hub-and-spoke model, meaning there is one center that imparts information and services to several communities, houses, and hospitals.

Telemedicine has two major branches, one of them deals with issues in real-time, known as synchronous telemedicine. The other deals with store-and-forward type issues like data transfer from one facility to another for examination or remote patient monitoring programs that send data to healthcare providers on a daily-basis for follow-up.

Telemedicine aims to increase access to medical information in addition to expert care for all patients, even those who are geographically distant from a medical facility. The importance of telehealth has truly been felt after the coronavirus pandemic hit and the need for social distancing became imperative.

With so many people unable to visit doctors for minor as well as major health issues, telehealth has seemed like a godsend, as patients have been able to recover without physical medical assistance.

The Increase in Neonatal Telehealth

Neonatal health is extremely important because a significant number of newborns need to be stabilized post-birth for health reasons. Around 10% of newborns even require assistance in breathing to survive.

Using innovative technology and telehealth practices, most hospitals and medical facilities are now able to offer virtual clinical services to patients for a host of health issues, ranging from psychiatric, gastrointestinal, and even speech therapy. E-consultations have become a huge thing recently and their help is often targeted towards cardiology and neonatal patients.

Telehealth allows the patient and the healthcare expert to be in direct, high-definition visual contact. This allows pediatricians and neonatologists to easily see the breathing of the infant, their skin pigmentation, and make accurate assessments of the infant’s blood pressure.

In this way, telehealth allows for greater defense against life-threatening events that are often associated with childbirth.

Services Provided in Neonatal Telehealth

Major neonatal telehealth services include, but are in no way limited to, the following:

•     Remote daily rounds,
•     Consults and assists with diagnoses,
•     Review of lab results, CT scans, and X-rays,
•     Thorough patient assessments

Future of Telehealth in Neonatology

Since it has been around for a while now, telemedicine has developed more proactive models of caring for critical patients and even have an eICU for them.

An eICU consists of ICU nurses and intensivists who deal with several ICU locations, providing both consultations and hands-on instructions on how to care for the critically ill.

They make use of algorithms and video technology to care for remote patients more proactively. Telemedicine programs each differ in their design, workflow, and even the evaluation of outcomes.

Because it is a booming industry in healthcare technology right now, telemedicine is bound to continue well into the future as well. It has shown that delivering higher patient outcomes and improving family-centered care is a job that it can handle quite well, especially for populations that would otherwise be unable to receive such expert care.

This has the added benefit of patients undergoing specialized procedures and examinations without having to stress about traveling to receive these services. In the future, however, recruiting the best neonatal nurses will be a difficult job due to the fierce competition that will arise.

Nurses will not only need to be highly qualified but also be extremely tech-savvy to keep up with the rapid advancements in medicine. Therefore, knowledge about the technology being used will have to be stellar. This challenge may not be as daunting for millennial nurses though as these generations have been growing up on technology and it seems to come very naturally to them.

The future of telemedicine looks promising because it not only helps remote and unreachable patients but also because it reduces costs by a margin.

Learn more about how neonatal telehealth can benefit you here

How Telemedicine can help in Addiction Treatment and Recovery?

Telemedicine is the clinical use of long-distance technology in diagnosing and treating patients over the phone. It comes in very handy in cases of remote areas where providing medical attention to residents is not easy. One of the first uses of telemedicine was in psychiatric wards, where camera systems were set up so professionals could observe patient behavior.

Today, because of the advancements in video and internet technologies, the extent to which doctors can help remote patients has improved significantly.

The Importance of Telehealth Services During COVID-19

The need for remote medical services became much more pronounced after the pandemic began because social distancing became the new norm, and as things got worse, keeping medical healthcare professionals safe became a top priority. But the kind of social isolation and loneliness people have been subjected to as a result of lockdowns and quarantine has proved to be a breeding ground for substance abuse disorders.

There has been a notable increase in the need for long-distance addiction therapy during Covid-19 than has ever been seen before. Quarantine has also been a massive hindrance for people who were in recovery because any plans to stop addictive tendencies that were previously in place were interrupted.

This has taken people right out of their recovery phase and back into their addict mindset. Because self-isolation is so stressed upon during the pandemic in-person group therapy sessions, which helped a lot of individuals, have also been discontinued.

However, because healthcare professionals are starting to rely more and more on telehealth and telemedicine services, organizations like AA and NA have been pushing for more virtual meeting opportunities for patients. Even for people who are in recovery, these kinds of daily meetings or check-ins could be monumental for their success.

Telemedicine Rehabilitation Services

Telerehabilitation is the virtual delivery of rehabilitation services to patients in the comfort of their homes. Accomplished through visual and audio technology, telemedicine has proved to be quite an effective replacement for regular therapy. The fact that it can overcome any geographical, physical and cognitive barriers is a huge milestone, especially in the present circumstances.

Because technology is constantly developing and improving, doctors and patients both have more apps to not only stay in touch but also to stay on top of their progress. Therefore, integrating a telerehabilitation system in the current healthcare structure is not only cost-effective but also has a positive social impact.

Research has shown that addiction patients prefer videoconferencing and smartphone apps to stay in touch with their doctors and that these technologies provide the greatest benefits and the greatest access to services for people in rural areas. Text messages are often used with substance use disorder patients to provide individual attention and more personalized help.

Even though research on the effectiveness of telemedicine in rehabilitation is limited, there is some evidence in favor of it, for example, patients tend to have fewer drinking days as well as fewer substance abuse days when they’re in telerehabilitation programs as opposed to normal care.

Telemedicine in Addiction Treatment

According to a study in 2018, despite its massive potential in addition to its effectiveness in dealing with addiction problems, telemedicine was widely underutilized in substance abuse and rehab centers.

With telemedicine, substance abuse patients feel like they have a sense of control over their lives, which is great for their recovery because most people afflicted with such disorders begin to feel like they no longer have any control. When they are interviewed and asked about what feels useful according to them, patients are more likely to open up when they’re in a familiar and comfortable environment like their home.

With telehealth services, patients can keep their doctors updated on their day-to-day progress by simply logging onto the app or platform where they usually communicate. This is easy, efficient and patients are more likely to get immediate help in cases where they need it.

In some patients, addictions are a product of certain underlying physical or mental health conditions. Telemedicine makes it extremely easy to get treatment for different types of diseases or conditions you’re suffering from. Mental health disorders can be targeted by mental health professionals and a physician can look at any physical problems that may have aggravated the addiction.

With regular use of telemedicine in recovery and addiction treatment programs, substance abuse patients can adopt healthy behavioral patterns and start their journey of becoming sober. All in all, healthier habits, constant communication with healthcare providers and consistent encouragement will help people who have addiction problems in their recovery.

Why We Need Telemedicine-Facilitated Recovery Programs

In certain parts of America, there’s an ongoing opioid crisis that former President Trump declared a public health emergency in 2017. This allowed doctors and health professionals to prescribe addiction medication to patients via telemedicine. This was a step in the right direction because instead of having struggling substance abuse patients gather funds and travel to visit a hospital for treatment, their treatment simply came to them.

In this way, more people were reached and therefore helped as a result of telemedicine. This was particularly true for the more rural areas where getting treatment for any disease, including addiction, is much harder because of scarce resources and remote locations.

Some question how effective telemedicine can be for addiction patients but there have been studies on the subject that imply that virtual communication and therapy for addiction sufferers have just as good an effect on patients as regular in-person interactions. If anything, most patients prefer this new form of communication and treatment because now the cure comes to them instead of them going out and looking for it.

Several doctors believe that telemedicine in addiction and recovery has been life-saving, this could be owing to the immediate and personalized attention doctors can provide to at-risk patients. Or it could be because people change their behaviors gradually and become healthier individuals over time.

Visit us for more information about the role of telemedicine in addiction and recovery