Telemedicine
Dr. Chidinma is an expert practitioner and advocate of Telemedicine as a way to bridge healthcare disparities and deliver care to populations without access to high quality healthcare practitioners.
What is Telemedicine?
Telemedicine is a way for doctors to provide health care to patients without being in the same physical location. It uses technology to allow virtual doctor-patient interactions and remote medical services.
Telemedicine offers significant advantages, primarily centered around enhanced convenience, reduced wait times, and improved access to high-quality care, particularly beneficial for patients residing in remote areas or facing mobility challenges. Additionally, it facilitates seamless follow-up appointments and enables the management of acute and chronic conditions from the comfort of one's home or locations where specialist doctors are not readily available.
Tele-ICU: Caring for critically ill patients
A tele-ICU (tele-intensive care unit) is a form of telemedicine that applies two-way audiovisual technology to provide remote monitoring and care for patients in intensive care units (ICUs).
Regarding Tele-ICU, its benefits are multifaceted. It enhances monitoring capabilities through the integration of critical care expertise, leading to faster detection and treatment of emergent issues. Moreover, it optimizes the utilization of scarce specialist resources across various locations and ensures the consistent application of best-practice protocols and care standards. Critically, Tele-ICU provides round-the-clock access to qualified intensivists, thereby enhancing critical care support even in smaller hospital settings.
The Practice of Remote Pulmonary Medicine
Pulmonary medicine focuses on treating diseases that affect the lungs and breathing. Traditionally, patients with respiratory issues had to travel to see a specialized pulmonary doctor in person. However, with new technology, pulmonary doctors can now provide care remotely using telecommunications - this is called tele-pulmonology.
With tele-pulmonology, pulmonary specialists can use video calling to virtually meet with patients and evaluate their symptoms, review test results like X-rays and lung scans, and develop treatment plans - all from a distance. They may also use peripherals such as remote stethoscopes to examine a patient’s lungs.