7 Benefits of Telehealth to Perioperative Care

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Roughly 312 million surgical operations are performed across the globe each year. To prepare patients for their surgery, they often have to come in for a pre-surgery consultation with a specialist and often travel long-distances for that purpose. Aside for the procedure itself, patients also often have to come back for post-surgical care and if complications arise, even have to come back multiple times to see a specialist. Given billions of people live in remote areas this requires extensive travel for surgery. The pre- and post-operative care is a cost and time-consuming part of the surgery and one of the key benefits of telehealth.

The surgery process usually consists of three phases: preoperative, intraoperative, and postoperative phase with the perioperative care occurring in the time frame before and after surgery. The primary goal of perioperative care is to provide better conditions for patients leading up to surgery and during recovery. This means a lot of travel for many patients, if they must attend these appointments in person and that results in increased costs in conjunction with time-consuming journeys.

With Telemedicine becoming more and more advanced, the definition of telehealth, once being a term used to describe merely a better video-call option, has evolved to be a solution that saves cost and time for both, patients and Healthcare Professionals. A big barrier for healthcare is the distance and the lack of specialists in remote locations. This means that patients travel long distances for visits. If the planned surgery needs patients to come in for preoperative and postoperative examinations, the cost for the needed surgery can easily become unaffordable for the patient. Time and cost are two valuable components that telehealth can help with. 

Advantages for Perioperative Care with Telehealth:

• Specialists can connect with patients via a device such as the ProEX or ProEX Mobile and the nurse or Healthcare Professional can conduct perioperative examinations such as (but not limited to) Blood pressure, Blood Glucose levels, ECG and send the results directly to the specialist. These results can be uploaded to the patient record. 
• Questions regarding the surgery along with recommendations after the procedure can be discussed without the need to travel
• This also helps relieve stress and anxiety that can occur before surgery and therefore telehealth helps patients to balance their mental health.
• In the event of complications which would require for the patient to stay in the hospital for monitoring, telehealth can help in getting the patient back to his home where they feel more comfortable and have the support of family and community.
• Telehealth physiotherapists can assist patients with exercise tips to regain mobility after a surgery and ensure remotely located patients receive the necessary postoperative care
• Using tele-healthcare patients and healthcare providers helps decrease the travel burden and improve the perioperative care by limiting the cost for patients
• Providers have the advantage of reaching a much larger patient population, decreasing the readmission to hospitals, and improving the efficiency of preoperative care.

In addition to these advantages, telehealth devices (such as the ProEX or ProEX Mobile) support pre- and postoperative care by enabling healthcare providers to share patient data via electronic health records (EHR) integration. EHRs can be sent to any specialist who can then view the record without the patient needing to be present. Data integration solutions are crucial to making telehealth the future of healthcare and without this integration, Telehealth would be only be a simple video call. As we can see, telehealth can be so much more than just a video call.

Sector updates are provided by organisations to eHealthNews.nz and have not necessarily been edited or checked for accuracy. Any queries should be directed to the organisation issuing the release.

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