Telehealth and Smoking Cessation: As the COVID-19 pandemic continues to rage, states, payers, and providers are looking for ways to expand access to telehealth services. To keep you informed, Manatt Health has developed a federal and 50-state tracker of policy, regulatory and legal changes related to telehealth during this pandemic.
Telehealth and Smoking Cessation
Despite some lingering reimbursement issues, telehealth is increasingly being used to deliver patient-centered care in a variety of healthcare settings. In addition, telehealth has been found to improve patient satisfaction and help physicians build trust with patients.
1. Patient-Centered Care
Patient-centered care involves cultivating personal relationships with patients to build trust, empathy, and a feeling of connection. This type of relationship improves patient satisfaction and a clinician’s job satisfaction, and is linked to patient loyalty and quality of care.
In a patient-centered care model, clinicians work with their patients to develop individualized treatment plans and goals for recovery. In addition, patient feedback is incorporated into the care plan to improve outcomes.
A patient-centered approach also enables clinicians to better understand their patients’ emotional and behavioral needs, which can help them to provide more effective care. Furthermore, this style of care allows for increased communication between physicians and nurses, which leads to a reduction in patient fatigue.
Despite telehealth’s growing popularity, researchers are concerned that disadvantaged groups of patients may not have access to telehealth care. This is because telehealth can often be more costly than in-person visits, and some insurance plans do not pay for telehealth services.
2. Personalized Care
Personalized care is a new model of healthcare that focuses on delivering personalized treatment based on patient characteristics. It uses predictive technologies and engages patients in shared decision-making to coordinate care, reducing costs and improving outcomes.
Several studies have shown that telehealth and patient-centered care are effective at helping people quit smoking. These results are especially true for patients living in rural areas or in other underserved populations that lack access to healthcare facilities that offer smoking cessation treatments.
Despite this, there are still barriers to telehealth use. One key barrier is a lack of understanding about telehealth and a patient’s willingness to use it. To overcome this barrier, health care providers should educate their patients about telehealth and provide them with tools to get started.
3. Remote Monitoring
Telehealth is a rapidly growing form of healthcare delivery that provides medical care to patients remotely. It includes synchronous and asynchronous video, secure messaging over applications, remote patient monitoring, and other health services.
While telehealth can’t completely replace in-person visits, it offers convenience, time and cost savings, access to specialists far away, and other benefits, according to Kevin Curtis, M.D., a physician at Dartmouth-Hitchcock Health and the director of the center for telehealth. During the COVID-19 pandemic, which made many people homebound or otherwise unable to travel, telehealth use surged in Dartmouth-Hitchcock and other health systems across the country.
One of the most popular types of telehealth is remote patient monitoring, or RPM. It involves deploying devices like blood pressure monitors, thermometers, glucometers, and weighing scales into patients’ homes or pockets to collect their health data. The resulting reports can be sent to the provider, reducing both patient travel costs and risk of infection.
4. Telemedicine Education
Telemedicine is a rapidly developing technology that is quickly gaining recognition throughout the medical community. It is increasingly recognized as a valuable mode of care that can improve access and reduce cost for patients, particularly those living in rural and underserved areas.
In order to ensure that physicians are prepared to effectively utilize telemedicine, it is critical to integrate telemedicine training into the undergraduate medical education curriculum in the United States. This can be done through a variety of institution-dependent avenues, such as didactic learning, real patient or standardized patient encounters that develop telemedicine competencies, and scholarly projects that allow deeper insights into telemedicine technology.
Several medical schools are already actively incorporating telemedicine training into their curricula. For example, Thomas Jefferson University, the University of Texas (Galveston), and Southern Illinois University have all implemented distinct telemedicine clerkships to educate medical students on how to use telehealth in clinical practice. Moreover, many other institutions are developing and implementing programs to provide telemedicine exposure for their undergraduate medical students.
In conclusion, telehealth has proven to be a game-changer in the healthcare industry, providing patients with convenient, accessible, and cost-effective solutions to their healthcare needs. As the technology continues to evolve and improve, its impact on smoking cessation is also expected to grow.
Emerging trends such as remote monitoring, artificial intelligence, and wearable technology will play a critical role in enhancing the effectiveness of telehealth-based smoking cessation programs. With the increasing demand for telehealth solutions, it is essential for healthcare providers to stay abreast of these developments and incorporate them into their practices.
Telehealth has the potential to revolutionize the way we approach smoking cessation, and as the technology advances, so will the opportunities to help individuals quit smoking and lead healthier lives.
The future of telehealth and smoking cessation is exciting, and with the right investments, innovations, and collaboration between healthcare providers and technology companies, we can expect to see even more promising results in the years to come.
