The COVID-19 epidemic boosted telemedicine's acceptance and advancement in India. India has a low doctor-to-patient ratio, with only one doctor for every 1,445 Indians, which makes it more difficult to deliver healthcare services fairly. A WHO survey shows that 40.8% of all health workers live in rural areas, where 72.2% of people live, and 59.2% live in urban areas, where 27.8% live. It is regarded as a tool for using technology to diagnose and treat patients remotely, increasing accessibility to health care and dissolving geographical barriers that delay treatment. The website Healthworld.com states that if telemedicine platforms keep growing, their industry is expected to reach $286.22 billion by 2030 from $94.44 billion in 2023.
WHAT DO WE MEAN BY TELEMEDICINE?
Telemedicine is the technique of treating and diagnosing patients online from anywhere globally using communication networks. The goal is to achieve a strong and reliable health system with the help of digital health. Medical Professionals can accurately diagnose, treat, and prevent diseases and injuries using new technology and information. Up until February 2023, eSanjeevani, the government's telemedicine platform, registered over 10 crore consultants.
IS TELEMEDICINE NECESSARY FOR THE HEALTHCARE SYSTEM?
Growing healthcare costs and the need for better care lead to hospitals looking into the benefits of telemedicine. They want better utilization of healthcare facilities and more communication between doctors and remote patients. Improved connectivity brought by telemedicine has decreased hospital readmissions and complete faithfulness by patients to their prescribed treatment regimens.
- Availability and Ease of use: Telemedicine offers accessibility, which is the most important benefit. Patients can connect with the professionals without going anywhere by sitting at home, even if they live far away or in underserved locations. With this approach, people get the best of their treatment while being in their comfort zone.
- Economical: - Telemedicine helps to lower the expenditure for both patients and providers. Doctors benefited by cutting the cost of operating physical offices while patients saved travel time fees and time away from work. They can have good access to care for non-emergency diseases.
- Maintained Care: - With Telemedicine, Quality is highly maintained, for people who have long-term illnesses. Heart issues, hypertension, and diabetes all can be handled via virtual checkups. A communication touch between doctors and patients results in better treatment and problems can be identified at an early stage.
- Increased availability of experts: - Specialized care is limited in many places in India. Communicating online, one can contact specialized doctors who might be located in another country or state. Patients can overcome unusual situations if access to local experts is not available.
- Improved involvement of patients: - Telemedicine provides patients portals, where they can check their test results, and any kind of medical information or book their appointments. These features encourage patients to participate more actively in their care.
HOW DOES ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE FUNCTION IN TELEMEDICINE?
People have accepted telemedicine widely because of Corona outbreak in 2019. Involving Artificial intelligence in telemedicine helps to achieve accurate diagnostics, monitor patients, and boost healthcare. This combination offers numerous chances to use AI technology to customize healthcare solutions to meet particular needs. In 2019, GE Healthcare and MIT Technology published a survey in which 75% of medical practitioners who used AI, reportedly improved treatment predictions. Also,78% of respondents mentioned workflow enhancements, and 79% recognized AI’s contribution to preventing fatigue among healthcare workers.
Artificial intelligence is commonly applied in three key areas of telemedicine: tele diagnosis, patient monitoring, and healthcare information technology.
- Monitoring the patients: - Remote patient monitoring (RPM), also called telemonitoring, where information is gathered from patients without visiting hospitals while keeping track of their health and well-being. This not only improves doctor-patient communication but also helps medical experts to detect diseases while at home.
- ?Health Information Technology: - Nowadays, the healthcare system can store and manage electronic data with the help of health information technology. It includes patient e-prescriptions and electronic health records, helping patients to handle problems like diabetes or flu.
- Tele-diagnosis of clinical conditions: - A health care practice that includes diagnosis of a patient’s illness by a doctor from a distance is considered Tele-diagnosis. Some studies have proved to be useful in diagnosing the early stages of Cancer and this can increase the chances of getting cured. These days AI is highly used in tele-medicines, in one case, a threatening skin cancer named melanoma was detected with convolutional neural networks
ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE IN TELEMEDICINE: A REVOLUTION APPROACH
There is no denying AI's potential in telemedicine, but implementing those advantages will need planning. The following is a summary of important actions to think about when integrating AI into your telemedicine platform: -
- Establish your needs and goals: - We need to set some goals before starting. We need to check a few things -
- Improve Diagnosis: - Using AI to analyze clinical data, patient records, and medical imagery to improve diagnosis accuracy.
- Care Management should be streamlined: - AI chatbots are used to check symptoms, remind patients when to take their medications, and provide basic health information to manage chronic illnesses.
- Customized Treatments: Artificial intelligence in telemedicine can easily assess patient data and provide treatment based on the patient's past medical records, genetic data, and current symptoms.???
- Better Accessibility: -? Telemedicine is more widely available with AI virtual assistants as they can check patients’ symptoms, prioritize them as per the severity, and schedule appointments.??
- Protect and Handle Your Information: AI majorly depends on data, and data privacy is essential in healthcare. One needs to be very sure that the data management system is secured.
- Choose the right AI technology: - Every Application requires different tools. We need to choose which one is good for the technology that can achieve the target by doing proper research: -
- Machine Learning: - Instruct AI technology to explore more and more data sets check the trends in patient data and personalize their treatment.
- ?Natural Language Processing (NLP): Create AI chatbots that can solve all the inquiries of patients from giving basic information about health to fixing appointments.
- ?Image Identification: - Examine X-rays and MRIs to identify abnormalities or to diagnose diseases.
- Create the Infrastructure: - Applications of AI can require a lot of processing power. Assess the state of your current IT setup and consider the things below: -
- Updating Internal servers: -?We need to verify that servers have enough processing power to manage workloads involving artificial intelligence.
- Cloud-based Solutions: -Use flexible and reasonably priced cloud computing resources to assist with the application of AI.
- Continuous Development: - AI models change from time to time. So we must check and track the performance, get user input, and spot the areas of improvement. Also, check the data so that the effectiveness can be maintained and improve the AI model.
Technology is developing at the cost of innovation. So, policymakers, healthcare professionals, and technology developers must make a combined effort to ensure the ethical incorporation of AI in telemedicine. If a patient understands telehealth and its benefits, then, he/ she can make more well-informed choices in their daily life. Whether you want convenience, specialized treatment, or improved management of chronic diseases, virtual healthcare is an important resource to consider.
