After the difficult and confusing times of COVID, people and businesses are slowly coming back to normal. The pandemic did not only affect our ways of living, working, but also our opportunities to receive medical care. Since the restrictions of COVID, Telemedicine has experienced a surge in the healthcare industry.
Most of us have heard of telemedicine. It describes the use of communication technologies to provide patient consultations, diagnoses, and patient analysis remotely. In simpler terms, it provides an online doctor. During lockdown, and even after restrictions have been eliminated, patients had a hard time getting to their doctors without absurd waiting times for appointments (van Ginneken et al., 2022). “You have a headache? Alright, you can come see us March 2025”. Ignoring those waiting times, even after getting an appointment, patients might wait for hours just to have a 5-minute consultation. Telemedicine aims to resolve these issues. Telemedicine is accessible for anyone with internet and a mobile device. Patients from rural areas must not take an hour train to get to the next best doctor. Employees must not take up half their working day to get an annual check-up. Most importantly, telemedicine offers convenience (Stoltzfus et al., 2023). After COVID people got “lazy”. They are used to working from home, enjoy receiving takeout food, ordering groceries to their front door, and ultimately get a medical consultation online. If chores like these can be made more convenient, people are doing it.
This convenience can be matched with high levels of accuracy using AI in the medical field. AI is revolutionising patient care in diagnostics and early detection, predictive analysis, personalised treatment plans, robotic surgery, and virtual health assistants. To name an example, AI was able to detect breast cancer years before doctors could diagnose it with their bare eyes (Pesapane et al., 2024). AI-driven chatbots and virtual health assistants provide initial consultations and health advice, streamlining the patient experience and reducing the burden on healthcare professionals. AI also enhances remote patient monitoring by analysing data from wearable devices to detect anomalies and alert providers in real time (Sharma et al., 2022). In Telemedicine, AI enhances the quality of the consultation by assisting with real-time decision support systems and data-driven insights, which might be missed without assistance.
Both of these applications are disrupting the current healthcare industry. This new generation of medical care cannot replace doctors as we know them, but sure adds an immense value to it. Enhanced patient care and convenience, makes the pairing of AI and telemedicine an unbeatable opportunity for the medical care of tomorrow.
List of references:
van Ginneken, E., Reed, S., Siciliani, L., Eriksen, A., Schlepper, L., Tille, F., & Zapata, T. (2022). The impact of the COVID-19 pandemic on noncommunicable disease resources and services: Results of a rapid assessment (Policy brief No. 47). World Health Organization. https://iris.who.int/bitstream/handle/10665/358832/Policy-brief-47-1997-8073-eng.pdf?sequence=1
Pesapane, F., Giambersio, E., Capetti, B., Monzani, D., Grasso, R., Nicosia, L., Rotili, A., Sorce, A., Meneghetti, L., Carriero, S., & others. (2024). Patients’ perceptions and attitudes to the use of artificial intelligence in breast cancer diagnosis: A narrative review. Life, 14(4), 454. https://doi.org/10.3390/life14040454
Sharma M, Savage C, Nair M, Larsson I, Svedberg P, Nygren J
Artificial Intelligence Applications in Health Care Practice: Scoping Review
J Med Internet Res 2022;24(10) DOI: 10.2196/40238
Stoltzfus, M., Kaur, A., Chawla, A. et al. The role of telemedicine in healthcare: an overview and update. Egypt J Intern Med 35, 49 (2023). https://doi.org/10.1186/s43162-023-00234-z
Very insightful blog! Telemedicine has gained great influence all over the world, and digital platforms working on connecting patients and doctors have thrived. There could be a cross-side network effect, as the value perceived by the patients increase with the numbers of doctors registered on the platform. Also with more cases and data accumulated, AI in medical field would be more precise and professional. However, as these platforms are emerging in a very fast speed, the regulations on data privacy would have an impact on them in the future.