Tele-Health and neurology: what is possible?

Abstract

Emerging information and communication technology is changing medical and psychological practice by enabling the provision of services across time and distance, yet there are significant concerns about these applications. Given the emerging nature of trial evidence in teleneurology, our aim is to provide a narrative review, in order to investigate possible oncoming fields of applications that are very important in healthcare practices delivered to patients affected by neurological diseases. We will focus on the use of Tele-Health in neurological practice, highlighting the potential benefits of applying information and communication technology also to psychosocial and educational aspects of neurological diseases treatment. This work is based on PubMed search, manual search of published abstracts/conference proceedings, and consultation with investigators in neurological disease. We refer also to the broader Tele-Health research concerning mental diseases. Tele-Health has obvious advantages in rural areas, where it improves access to health services, obviating the need for patients and healthcare workers to travel and assuring continuance to healthcare services delivery. Even in urban areas, however, Tele-Health can improve access to health services and to information. It may sometimes also be cheaper than conventional practice, even if there is generally limited knowledge of the cost-effectiveness of Tele-Health services compared to conventional methods of delivering health services.

Telemedicine for patients with epilepsy: A pilot experience

“…Acute stroke care has benefited the most so far from the advent of this technology [1][2][3][4], but other neurological applications have been reported [5][6][7][8]. Telemedicine has the potential of improving access of patients with epilepsy residing in rural areas to epileptologists in tertiary care centers [9,10].…”

Virtual Reality in Health System: Beyond Entertainment. A Mini‐Review on the Efficacy of VR During Cancer Treatment

“…Research in pharmaceutical (Wang et al, 2014), biophysical (Linden et al, 2013), and neurological fields (Timpano et al, 2013) now can count on readily available calculating technology-based systems to predict information that previously would have remained unknown or for which years of expensive research would have been required (Foffi et al, 2013;Ciccarelli et al, 2014). The application of modern technology to the health field provides a fruitful breeding ground for new knowledge acquisition, and its use is bringing new important advantages.…”

Telemedicine in neurology: where are we going?

“…Thus, this is of greatest benefit to populations with restricted access to general and subspecialty neurological care, including neurorehabilitation, in rural areas, to those with limited mobility, and those deployed by the military. Using real-time audiovisual interaction, imaging, and store-and-forward systems, a greater proportion of neurologists are able to meet the demand for specialty care in underserved communities, decrease the response time for acute neurological disease assessment, and expand the collaboration between primary care physicians, neurologists and other disciplines [2]. To this end, M€ uller et al show how the use of telemedicine in the management of headache may help combat misdiagnoses, delay and suboptimal treatment of headaches, avoiding unnecessary travel by consulting remotely via telemedicine.…”

“…Telemedicine can be considered nowadays as an integrated, biomedical and psychosocial, secondary prevention intervention, where a specialized team guides the patient and his/her family in the course of the disease by reducing the stress of caregivers and allowing patients to stay longer at home [2].…”