How Telemedicine is Changing Healthcare

There is plenty of room for improvement in the healthcare industry, and telemedicine is making its latest contribution in the form of mobile health consulting.

Why are new healthcare solutions necessary? Next to heart disease and cancer, healthcare incompetence is the number three cause of death among Americans. Every year, 210,000 to 400,000 patients die due to accidental practice in the United States.

This is driving more entrepreneurs to create mobile applications that give users extended accessibility to their doctors. How will such apps change healthcare practices? Here are seven ways.

1. Better rapport. You can build and maintain a good patient-doctor relationship without having to wait in a clinic alongside other sickly patients. This in turn makes for more personalized consultations.
2. 24/7 services. Have a symptom that you’re deeply worried about? With apps such as TouchCare, you can reach your doctor at any time of the day and from any location (in case you’re traveling). Plus, your follow-up consultations no longer require driving to your doctor’s office. Now that’s convenient!
3. Simplified solutions. Telemedicine makes developments and interrelationships in the healthcare industry less complex.
4. Data access. iBlueButton lets users (for now, active duty military and veterans plus their beneficiaries) store their medical records on their smartphone. Physicians are notified of possible side effects of medications, allowing for better drug reconciliation.
5. Common goal. Healthcare stands for patient care. And this is what app developers deliver as they empower and inform users and make patient care more manageable for families and caregivers.
6. Enhanced efficiency. The latest apps make consults via phone and email unnecessary. They also help address problems of bureaucracy in larger organizations.
7. More flexibility. Physicians get quick and easy access to patients. And on iBlueButton, they can even use secure messaging to pull up medical records.

With all its benefits, the newest smartphone apps are changing the way we perceive and receive “patient care.”