Question

Read Chapter 22 and watch the You tube video and answer the 2 questions . Relate to our current crisis with Covid 19.

1. Will the increased use of these tele-health technology tools be viewed as dehumanizing patient care, or will they be viewed as a means to promote more contact with healthcare providers and new ways for people to stay connected (as in online disease support groups), thereby creating better long-term disease management and patient satisfaction?

https://youtu.be/cOT6DjgER2Y

2. As tele-health technology advances toward seamless data access regardless of distance or health system, how can patient privacy rights and the confidentiality of personal medical data be protected?

Answer 1

1. The increased use of telehealth technology tools will not be viewed as dehumanizing patient care, rather they will be viewed as a means to promote more contact with healthcare providers and new ways for people to stay connected, thereby creating better long-term disease management and patient satisfaction. Telehealth has turned out to be an affordable, safe, and quick-access patient assessment, education, prescription, and followup technology. Without telehealth it would have been impossible to get access to physician consultation or followup during a pandemic like the current COVID19 crisis. With an increasing number of COVID19 patients and a lesser number of physicians and other healthcare professionals to attend, telehealth was the only option left for many patients. They got access to physicians through telehealth sites/apps, who diagnosed illnesses and gave the plan of care through these. Many of them who were working long 12-hour shifts for the COVID19 patients could attend to the patients who sought medical care only because of telehealth. Telehealth was a great help when the hospitals were flooded with COVID19 patients, and there was no room for patients with other disease conditions. The patients from a highly affected state like New York could consult a physician from a less affected state like Wyoming through telemedicine. Many countries of the world used telemedicine to track, quarantine, test, and isolate/treat COVID 19 patients. Thus telemedicine was effectively used to control the pandemic in these countries. The physicians attended many patients through telehealth and saved them from any emergency caused due to the worsening of their disease conditions thereby creating better long-term disease management and patient satisfaction.

2.  As telehealth technology advances toward seamless data access regardless of distance or health system, patient privacy rights and the confidentiality of personal medical data can be protected in many ways. The most important method to address data breach of personal health information or personally identifiable information is by preventing unauthorized access. Data encryption is considered as the most powerful weapon against data breach. Advanced Encryption Standard, Triple Data Encryption Standard, Rivest-Shamir-Adleman, and Twofish are some of the common encryption methods. In data encryption, the encoded data, commonly referred to as encrypted data or ciphertext, can only be accessed by authorized users. The plaintext or the original text is converted into ciphertext by encryption algorithms. The use of up-to-date security software can also help in preventing/minimizing data breach.