REVIEW ARTICLE
Telemedicine and Teleconsulting in the Era of COVID-19 Pandemic: A Useful Tool from Screening to Intensive Care Monitoring
Raffaele Abete1, *, Andrea Lorenzo Vecchi2, Attilio Iacovoni1, Andrea Mortara3, Michele Senni1
Article Information
Identifiers and Pagination:
Year: 2021Volume: 15
First Page: 115
Last Page: 118
Publisher ID: TOBEJ-15-115
DOI: 10.2174/1874120702115010115
Article History:
Received Date: 19/01/2021Revision Received Date: 31/05/2021
Acceptance Date: 20/8/2021
Electronic publication date: 31/12/2021
Collection year: 2021
open-access license: This is an open access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International Public License (CC-BY 4.0), a copy of which is available at: https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/legalcode. This license permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original author and source are credited.
Abstract
The COVID-19 global pandemic has had striking effects on clinical practice and medical assistance and the progressive evolution of telemedicine and telehealth systems has allowed healthcare professionals to connect with patients yet respecting the striking need for social distancing. This article aims to review the possible ways to use telehealth and teleconsulting systems to guarantee an adequate level of clinical assistance starting from screening procedures up to support the management of patients admitted to intensive care units area, thus balancing the need to ensure continuity of care and at the same time limiting the possible sources of contagion expansion. Telemedicine may be a useful tool to improve clinical assistance and reduce the financial burden on the health system in a long-term view. Although it cannot completely replace patient-physician interactions, it would be desirable to implement this field and made it accessible to the largest part of the population.