Global Telemedicine Implementation and Integration Within Health Systems to Fight the COVID-19 Pandemic: A Call to Action

By R. Ohannessian, T. Duong, A. Odone. JMIR Public Health and Surveillance, 2020

915 citations recorded by the source corpus.

On March 11, 2020, the World Health Organization declared the coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) outbreak as a pandemic, with over 720,000 cases reported in more than 203 countries as of 31 March. The response strategy included early diagnosis, patient isolation, symptomatic monitoring of contacts as well as suspected and confirmed cases, and public health quarantine. In this context, telemedicine, particularly video consultations, has been promoted and scaled up to reduce the risk of transmission, especially in the United Kingdom and the United States of America. Based on a literature review, the first conceptual framework for telemedicine implementation during outbreaks was published in 2015. An updated framework for telemedicine in the COVID-19 pandemic has been defined. This framework could be applied at a large scale to improve the national public health response. Most countries, however, lack a regulatory framework to authorize, integrate, and reimburse telemedicine services, including in emergency and outbreak situations. In this context, Italy does not include telemedicine in the essential levels of care granted to all citizens within the National Health Service, while France authorized, reimbursed, and actively promoted the use of telemedicine. Several challenges remain for the global use and integration of telemedicine into the public health response to COVID-19 and future outbreaks. All stakeholders are encouraged to address the challenges and collaborate to promote the safe and evidence-based use of telemedicine during the current pandemic and future outbreaks. For countries without integrated telemedicine in their national health care system, the COVID-19 pandemic is a call to adopt the necessary regulatory frameworks for supporting wide adoption of telemedicine.

Subfields: Oncology, Public Health, Environmental and Occupational Health, Radiology, Nuclear Medicine and Imaging

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Citations in the corpus

Digital Health Strategies to Fight COVID-19 Worldwide: Challenges, Recommendations, and a Call for Papers (2020, background): “The COVID-19 pandemic is providing a starting point to discuss how digital health solutions can and should be leveraged to address this unprecedented crisis [8].”
Perceived social impacts of tourism and quality-of-life: a new conceptual model (2020, background): “Recent studies across other disciplines (Hernandez-Garcia & Gimenez-Julvez, 2020; Ohannessian et al., 2020; Smith et al., 2020) lend support to the proposed argument that prosocial behaviours can lead to support for tourism development.”