The healthcare industry is rapidly transitioning into a fully digital model, which includes telehealth or telemedicine. However, its growing demand and fast-paced nature render it difficult for traditional healthcare providers to comprehend the advancements as fully as needed. Nurses can all too easily feel coerced into offering services when they are unprepared to handle complexities that can easily arise. The industry appears to readily expect nurses and telehealth to be a natural fit, when in many cases, nurses need more specialized training and supervised experience. In this article, we will delve deeper into a more manageable relationship between nurses and telehealth.
What Role Does Telehealth Play in Nursing?
Telehealth technology is all about delivering the best care in an accessible manner. Consequently, nursing is closely related to the delivery of patient care. That means these healthcare professionals can have a lasting influence on telemedicine advancements if there is a convergence between this technology and nursing.
With it, nurses can offer improved continuity of care, help more patients, and provide better access to healthcare. Telemedicine might reduce the burden of a nurse’s administrative duties, like gathering patient information and verifying insurance coverage. Moreover, this technology gives nurses flexibility, allows them to explore other departments, and builds better patient relationships.
Incorporating telemedicine will allow nurses to offer better and faster care. It also significantly brings down the cost of healthcare. For instance, telehealth saves travel costs and reduces readmissions for routine checkups.
The intricacies of telemedicine allow them to get real-time updates about their patients’ vitals, offer follow–up consultations, and more. Some industry leaders also believe this technology can reduce the national nursing shortage.
However, minimal training or awareness about telemedicine reduces the chances of achieving these benefits among nurses and patients.
Limitations of Nurses and Telehealth
Reports state that telehealth has received overwhelming acceptance, but not without unavoidable problems. The limitations occur due to a lack of training and implementation of this technology among nurses.
Many healthcare facilities adopted this technology because it was ‘trendy.’ Approximately 5,000 American hospitals have incorporated telehealth technology without proper planning or awareness. Hence, these healthcare professionals were unaware of how to use these technologies.
These nurses were not prepared to address sensitive healthcare issues through telemedicine. For instance, they did not know how to handle a patient’s discomfort about online privacy. Other than that, telehealth nursing comes with limitations like:
Lack of technical knowledge and software know-how
Issues with HIPAA-compliant licensing and patient record privacy
Unavailability of Internet of Things (IoT) devices compatible with telehealth
Increased hours of care and pressure to meet the quota to gain incentives
Nurses must get licenses in multiple states to offer nationwide services
The healthcare industry needs to be aware of these challenges to rethink ways to implement telemedicine in nursing.
The Importance of Telehealth Training
Change should start at the educational level. For instance, nurses should get tech training as part of their online Bachelor of Science in Nursing (BSN) courses. Online schooling for nursing can focus on basic training about telehealth services and how to operate them.
Universities can create online training modules to cover the technical