Telemedicine and high-quality care COVID -19 Crisis

Background: The novel corona virus (COVID-19) pandemic has drastically changed how patients aredecided and treated and how they access to ambulatory health care. Since there are currently noeffective treatments or vaccines to prevent COVID-19, the focus is placed on infection preventionthrough social distancing and quarantine. CDC (Centers for Disease Control and Prevention) has setforth recommendations to prevent infections in healthcare settings by decreasing or eliminatingnonurgent office visits. Telemedicine is a complex innovation bundle in that it is a technical as well asorganizational and social innovation. The communications and computing technologies beingdeveloped and used in the delivery of health care represent only one dimension of the change.Methods: We provide an author-initiated review of recent trends in telehealth, governmentalrecommendations for healthcare delivery during the COVID-19 pandemic. We searched for the studiesand articles of the PubMed database. From the items retrieved, those relevant to this paper wereincluded, with a focus on recent research to assure the conclusions made were up-to-date.Results: Fifty-four articles founded under the title Telemedicine, recommended prevention, treatment,and care of multidisciplinary diseases. Of all, 64.75% were in the field of telemedicine use, includingorthopedic diseases (5.55%), cancers and cervical diseases (9.25%), other diseases such asrheumatologic problems, surgery, neurosurgery, multidisciplinary, arthroplasty, rehabilitation, ear,nose and throat, liver disease, and inflammatory bowel disease were each (1.85%) and counseling(5.55%).Conclusion: Implementing a telemedicine clinic in the context of the COVID-19 crisis inmultidisciplinary clinics through a standardized process and using established tools is a feasible andsustainable process that can be utilized by other interdisciplinary programs. Having the organizationalsupport in HIT to provide for implementation and billing telemedicine visits are critical to the successof this effort.

Keywords:

Telemedicine , Information Technology , Telehealth , E-health , COVID-19