Categorizing the Various E-Health Activities Involving Patients & Consumers

We are in era when consumers are participating in various types of electronic health services. For example, I have been blogging for years about telemedicine, also known as teleconsultation (see, for example:Your Doctor in a Kiosk; A New Variant of Telemedicine;Telemedicine as a Tool for Physician Visits in Senior and Assisted Living Facilities). Some of these encounters involve video interactions between a physician/nurse and a patient. However, many patient-doctor interactions are occurring via e-messages which are essentially secure email distributed through a patient portal. Some e-messages need to be linked in some way to the relevant televisits. No all televisits are real-time with"store-and-forward" interactions now under consideration (see:Telehealth Terminology: ‘Store-and-Forward’ Has its Fans - And Critics). Some televisits are being taped and stored but I think that this is largely for forensic rather than quality reasons.Continuing in this same vein, CMS and regulatory bodies have been discussing how to manage provider-to-provider texting with some recent progress (see: CMS clarifies policy on texting patient info across healthcare teams). There is also the issue of provider-to-provider telemedicine in support of provider-to-patient telemedicine (seeThe Need for More Research in Provider-to-Provider Telemedicine). Fast forward to the issue of patients' interactions with their health wearables including c...

Source: Lab Soft News - January 11, 2018 Category: Laboratory Medicine Authors: Bruce Friedman Tags: Electronic Health Record (EHR) Healthcare Delivery Healthcare Information Technology Healthcare Innovations Lab Industry Trends Medical Consumerism Point-of-Care Testing Telemedicine Source Type: blogs