Telemedicine is the delivery of remote healthcare services by using information and communication technology. The medical information involves live video, audio, images, files, and medical records. Thus, the patient data is transmitted from monitoring devices or electronic patient records. Currently, patients and dentists are using telemedicine as required. However, the question is whether this technology will survive in the future for delivering healthcare services. In this current situation, the maximum number of people are using telemedicine. Telemedicine will continue to be a sustainable, mainstream way for delivering care services in the future. Another point favoring telemedicine is that it provides cost-effective delivery of health care services.
Lately, the government health sector has also realized that telemedicine is a strategic tool to deliver primary, secondary, and tertiary care. This is because this technology helps expand access to quality care of a dentist, much to the patients’ convenience. From another perspective, telemedicine plays a significant role for senior citizens. The dental app is very easy to use and provides unobtrusive communication. Therefore, senior citizens feel empowered when using this technology and are able to get dental care whenever they need it.
There are other benefits of telemedicine that can be leveraged so that telemedicine will continue to be used in the future. Here, the scope of telemedicine needs to be focused on areas such as teleconsultation, tele-education, telemonitoring, and telesurgery. When it comes to teleconsultation, it has remained at the heart of clinical practice ever since its inception and it is a tool that assists in clinical decision making. Tele-consultation takes place between dentists and patients, between dentists and specialists, and so on. Similarly, tele-education benefits can be leveraged through telemedicine. Telemedicine offers the sharing of educational material as well as consultations with dentists and specialists to acquire knowledge and get clarity over the dental issues relevant to the profession. Thus, telemedicine helps in clinical education and academic study.
Tele-monitoring involves gathering data sent by the patients through the store and forward method. Telemedicine helps in transmitting the data to the dentist, who analyzes and monitors the patient’s condition over a period of time. Like the other applications discussed above, telesurgery is another such application under the scope of telemedicine. During telesurgery, the specialist remotely provides assistance to the surgeon who is conducting surgery. It is delivered through the audio and video connection feature of the Dentulu dental app which forms the base for telemedicine.
As noted above, telemedicine has been a great asset in medical care. It will continue to be a valuable tool in the future for delivering healthcare services. It is expected that the increase in usage by both patients and healthcare professionals will continue to surge. Taking into consideration of the benefits in dental care, Dentulu has affirmed that it will continue to facilitate the many applications of telemedicine.