Implementation and Experiences of Telehealth: Balancing Policies With Practice in Countries of South Asia, Kuwait, and the European Union (Preprint)

Abstract

UNSTRUCTURED This viewpoint summarizes the discussion that occurred during the “Translating Policy to Practice in Telehealth–Lessons from Global Implementation Experiences” panel that was held virtually at Telemedicon2020, December 18-20, 2020. This panel brought together policy and implementation experts from some countries of South Asia, Kuwait, and the European Union to share their experiences in the development and implementation of telehealth standards and of the scale up of telehealth interventions within health systems. Several common themes arose from the discussion, including the significant role of people; encouragement by respective government policymakers; addressing concerns, particularly related to privacy, confidentiality, and security; and capacity building of human resources. These are discussed in turn, along with the future directions identified by the panelists, which emphasized the need for active encouragement toward the adoption and diffusion of digital health in general and of telehealth in particular. All stakeholders, ranging from governmental policymakers to common citizens, need to come together to build trusting partnerships to realize the advantages offered by telehealth.

Robotics Application in the Hospital Domain: Operator-Patient- Robot Interface

“…This involves the transmission of sensitive information about patientsʹ medical data. The challenge lies in ensuring that this data is protected against unauthorized access [96,98]. 2.…”

“…3. Health standardization and policy: The absence of standardization in the services associated with telemedicine can result in inconsistencies in the quality of healthcare [96,99].…”

“…However, in order to achieve this potential, it is necessary to address comprehensively the challenges related to privacy, quality of care, and regulation, in addition to the other challenges already mentioned. By addressing these challenges, healthcare systems can leverage the advantages of these cutting-edge technologies [96][97][98][99].…”