The current era of healthcare reform is driving a shift in priorities and pressures for delivery of high quality healthcare. With a surge in the need to efficiently meet patient care demands, and to accommodate the ever-evolving sophistication and modernization of information and communication technologies (ICT), it is an opportune time for innovative care delivery by telehealth. This article reviews the emergence of telehealth in America, describes modalities of telehealth services, and considers such factors as quality, means, and cost of delivery and need for telehealth services. Telehealth can increase access to primary and specialty care, and ensure high quality care at lower cost. The authors also discuss policy considerations related to telehealth, including the roles and contribution of nurses and future consideration for this state-of-the-art care model.

We propose a new framework to model the COVID-19 epidemic of the United Kingdom at the level of local authorities. The model fits within a general framework for semi-mechanistic Bayesian models of the epidemic, with some important innovations: we model the proportion of infections that result in reported deaths and cases as random variables. This is in contrast to standard frameworks that model the latent infection as a deterministic function of time varying reproduction number, Rt. The model is tailored and designed to be updated daily based on publicly available data. We envisage the model to be useful for now-casting and short-term projections of the epidemic as well as estimating historical trends. The model fits are available on a public website, https://imperialcollegelondon.github.io/covid19local. The model is currently being used by the Scottish government in their decisions on interventions within Scotland [1, issue 24 to now].

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