Telemedicine to Manage Hypertension, Diabetes and Asthma
Introduction
With the growing population of different societies, health care practitioners are gradually being required to render medical services to minority and underserved groups in the society. Health care practitioners have to deal with a lot of substantial health disorders and illnesses among racial and cultural minority groups. The expansive diversity of the population conveys different challenges for the healthcare industry in providing and delivering services uniformly to every community and social group, and to be assisted in health care needs. This undertaking is also a big opportunity for many different health care providers to provide services to those communities that need medical attention.
In improving healthcare outcomes and the quality of care there must be a culturally aware health care system. Our organization’s training on diversity awareness to health care professionals is the exactly the type this foundation needs, and we will show why. Access to the health care services to those groups of people that are underprivileged, helpless is very much indispensable. Medically underserved communities often situated in areas where there are high fraction of minority groups of people are characterized by a convergence of manifold disadvantages because of location and high poverty rates (Wootton, 2012). More than that though, as you will see we are a very innovative organization, that has the qualifications not only to train healthcare professionals, but we have the protocols and technologies in place to make this effort an extraordinary experience for both the patients and the doctors/nurses.
Statement of the Problem
There are many concerns about the wide range services of the healthcare sector due to the fact that there are still many people who are not in the proximity of any health care and cannot be given enough medical attention by healthcare professionals and medical volunteer groups because of their outlying locations. This is the reason why telemedicine has been identified as one of the possible solutions to the growing demand for health care services especially in the marginalized communities or those minority groups in hard to reach locations (Zieger, 2014). This modern approach can be utilized in order to bring about awareness and provide the medical needs of those communities who are suffering from hypertension, diabetes, COPD/asthma.
However, the implementation of this kind of health care service will be difficult to put into practice or sustain in the long term because of the cost of technological equipment and its maintenance (Castaneda, 2014). Certainly, there are underlying problems of utilizing telemedicine. These are, but not limited to, the excessive use of care due to redundant telemedicine consultations and poor attention to the concerns and issues of patients. According to a study by IESE and Telefonica, 80% of doctors and 70% of chronically ill patients would be willing to use telemedicine. But nonetheless, telemedicine can be the answer to some problems of the healthcare industry in terms of giving out or rendering services to the minority groups and communities.
The main objective of our organization is to develop awareness in terms of cultural values, medical support systems and equal chances for minority groups to be given the appropriate medical care. Also, the paper plans to put into practice the use of telemedicine so that areas with no access to medical services can be assisted by utilizing modern communications and technology in different health care procedures and medical treatments.
Selected Population
The selected population for this plan proposal will be the medically underserved minorities from the inner city, mainly those who are suffering from hypertension, diabetes, COPD/asthma. The health care system is having a continuous problem regarding the access to health care services in underserved communities. There are millions of people who are living in these areas that could not be reached by the health care system because of insufficient resources, lack of volunteers and unwilling physicians.
Telemedics, Inc seeks to serve all who are in need of health care assistance for diseased such as hypertension, diabetes, and COPD/asthma, and the subsequent consultations, medicines and other facilities by the use of modern technology devices and applications. With the right retention approaches to this targeted population the whole health care industry may have the capability to advance access of crucial medical care assistance to the targeted population in need. Since the telemedicine approach can extend medical care and services even at great distances, this will be a great medium to be utilized especially to those communities.
In addition, the aforementioned chronic illnesses make up a considerable weight of diseases in general. This organization is tasked and skilled to integrate the use of telemedicine in the treatment of these diseases. Telemedicine enables the transfer of information from one place to another with what we call tele-monitoring. This practice will also facilitate the contact between healthcare professionals and patients by using telephone support and virtual follow-up.
Plan Proposal and Objectives
The proposal of Telemedics, Inc. will focus on providing an increasing amount of knowledge and awareness to health care professionals so that they may know how to interact with minority groups and treat them with proper care and help to train them in tele-doctoring and telemedicine in a broader scope. This will encompass educational guidance or instruction to the people of the selected community or population headed by healthcare professionals and other volunteers since it is depicted that those minorities are not that familiar in using modern technologies.
This proposal also aims to iterate the need for establishing a system that would facilitate in the expansion of the network of medical professionals who extend help to those underserved communities in the inner city. The system can give the patients an ease of access and more treatment services through telemedicine (Express-News Editorial Board, 2014).
The progress of modern technology has provided the medical industry for bringing innovative conceptions in the alleviation of treating patients in outlying areas (Conn, 2014). It is the core duty of all health care providers to make certain that all patients will be given the best quality of health care services that they need. For this reason, the usage of Electronic Medical Record in Telemedicine provides the healthcare industry in general with whole lots of great opportunities to augment competence and effectiveness in the medical discipline.
Specific Innovations Being Offered — And Our Qualifications
The specifics of what our organization can do are not limited, of course, to training healthcare professionals to provide healthcare to the underserved. That is something that’s been done in one way or another before. The true genius is in the telemedicine procedures we’ve developed.
For hypertension and diabetes, We will send a nurse trained in our unique program to the housing area that the patient lives in one time; he or she will send us back live feeds (Hall, et.al. 2012) of what the current blood pressure is, and ensure that the patient knows how to use the tools we give them, including the blood pressure monitor, online stress journal, and assess whether or not that patient needs medication at that point in time (at which point a doctor will ask several questions regarding other medications and possible contraindications for that patient), and then have a script called in. From there, we will have the patient keep on a daily online journal, and meet with that specific nurse daily via skype (which will be provided to them), so that we can find the root sources of their conditions, such as diet, stress, and sedentary lifestyle (Bosworth, 2012). We feel it’s imperative that the patient can trust the activities, so using the same nurses and doctors are vital to the protocol working. We’ll then gauge how often we need to meet with the patient from there, and the patient will always have access to us during a set a range of hours.
For COPD and asthma, the monitoring will probably be for a longer period of time, so we can know the frequency of episodes and really gauge which medicines work and which don’t. We have qualified technologists who strive to find the best new ways of monitoring patients in need, and much like this foundation is, we strive for a way to be non-profit, another thing that uniquely qualifies us for this endowment.
Definition of Success for this Project
Telemedicine is a big component in the expansion of communications technology in the healthcare industry. It is being utilized in disease prevention, home health management and emergency care (Bashshur, et.al. 2014). Telemedicine is used by means of modern technology to provide medical services when health care professionals could not be able to attend to their patients who are in distant places.
The main intention of conducting this plan proposal is to identify the probable areas in which the practice of telemedicine is expected to be functional in letting people to know the policies of using telemedicine or telehealth. This proposal illustrates the methods and summarizes the findings that address how telemedicine activities can be improved to provide health care information and services for the selected population.
Modern technology is indeed very useful in the healthcare system. There are innovative telemedicine applications that are potentially expanding the scope of the health care services (Institute of Medicine, 2012). Despite the distance and other barriers for rendering medical care services to people, telemedicine substitutes the face-to-face or personal consultations of patients so that these barriers will not compromise or hinder the quality of care given by medical providers to their patients.
More often than not, because of inaccessible location of inner city residents, the medically underserved communities usually suffer from disparities in terms of having the timely access to high quality medical care services (Calhoun, 2015). In this regard, the overall objective of the proposal is to put into action the practice of telemedicine in order to improve access to appropriate and suitable precautionary and indicative, health care treatment and services for the medically underserved community.
Potential Community Stakeholders
The stakeholders in the communities involved will largely be the city itself, with various subsidies to improve the health of the most socioeconomically disadvantaged. The Ronald McDonald corporation has also promised to help with the cost of providing these services, particularly to those living in its shelters throughout the country. In addition, many small businesses have expressed an interest, and Amazon itself has agreed to donate some of their own computer tablets to help the cause of healthcare advancement for anybody who needs it. This not only makes people healthier, but in the long run, it makes them more productive. By being able to manage the health problems of many of these people, we are truly helping our entire community to reap the benefits of having a stronger workforce.
Potential Next Steps of the Proposed Project
The continued development and progress for this project proposal will depend on those who are very interested and willing to venture in the field of telemedicine. It is significant to put effort in the methodical assessment of telemedicine progression with regards to the quality, convenience, outlays and its suitability to the health care system (Denison, 2014). The framework presented in this proposal tries to speak about the established strategies of the health care services. Also, to further utilize the use of telemedicine in the health care of marginalized societies, further studies and researches should be conducted.
Conclusion
In order to expand and extend medical care services to those who badly need such assistance from the health care system, the industry must think of innovative ways or procedures that will be able to bring these health care services to people who are undermined by the society or those who are situated in remote areas. Hence, one possible way of eliminating this kind of problems is by utilizing the telemedicine practice. This proposal will try to grasp the opportunity of presenting the telemedicine to various health groups and organizations who might want to partake or involve their group and their campaigns in rendering health care services to the minority or marginal groups in the society. Moreover, this plan will specifically focus on managing patients’ who are undergoing health problems in hypertension, diabetes and COPD/asthma.
The execution of this kind of health care will be a viable solution to the increasing number of individuals who are not getting the right amount of health care services that they need to acquire from the government and the society. By properly using such mobile applications and devices, the health care practitioners and their patients will not have to travel the miles in order to personally interact with one another. By the use of telemedicine, the health care practitioners can give diagnosis and medical advices to their patients through video conference and by utilizing other technological devices.
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