Telemedicine for chronic pain management during COVID-19 pandemic

Abstract

Treatment of chronic pain is an essential service. Due to lockdown, travel restrictions, social and physical distancing requirements or fear that health care facilities may be infected; patients may avoid visiting health care facilities in person. It is also imperative to decrease the risk of exposure of the health care workers (HCWs) to severe acute respiratory syndrome corona virus 2 (SARS CoV2) and to ease the overtly burdened health care system. But any disruption in pain practice will have alarming consequences for individuals, society, and whole of health care system and providers. In the current scenario of COVID-19 pandemic, telemedicine is emerging as a key technology for efficient communication and sustainable solution to provide essential health care services and should be considered for chronic pain patients (CPPs). Recently, Board of Governors in supersession of Medical Council of India along with National Institution for Transforming India (NITI Aayog) released “Telemedicine Practice Guidelines” enabling registered medical practitioners to provide healthcare using telemedicine. This article describes the challenges in CPPs during COVID-19 pandemic and the use of telemedicine as the rescue management vehicle for CPPs in current scenario.

Optimizing telehealth pain care after COVID-19

“…Pre-COVID, telehealth typically required complicated and obtuse administrative, physical, technical safeguards, privacy, and business agreements between the user and vendor. 36 During COVID, government agencies in countries, such as the United States, Australia, and India, have waived enforcement discretion with a “good faith” provision of telehealth service, allowing the use of a range of any non–public-facing audio or video technology such as telephone, Skype, and FaceTime. Nonsecure email and texting are both temporarily permitted.…”

“…Nonsecure email and texting are both temporarily permitted. 4 , 36 However, given limited access to video teleconferencing for many, maintaining at least telephone-based services, when effective, may be justified on the basis of equity of access to services and cost.…”

Systematic review on telemedicine platforms in lockdown periods

“…On the other hand, VUC is provision of remote medical services for critical, immediate, or emergency conditions. [ 67 68 ] The use of NUC[ 7 17 27 28 29 30 31 34 37 38 39 41 42 43 44 45 48 49 50 52 56 ] is more prominent than the emergency applications VUC during the COVID-19 pandemic. [ 21 31 39 40 45 50 ] Among tele-COVID services, tele-triage,[ 29 30 31 32 33 34 35 36 ] tele-quarantine,[ 27 28 34 36 44 45 46 ] and tele-education (distance learning)[ 7 31 36 40 41 42 43 ] provision, particularly via social media platforms,[ 27 37 39 41 44 45 47 56 61 ] were more significant for tele-COVID.…”

Research in COVID times—Innovations, revolutions and contentions

“…[ 19 ] Strict quality vigilance exists for the manuscripts submitted to the IJA, and as a result, the COVID manuscripts have been associated with quite a high rejection rate of nearly 84% [ Figure 1 ]; nevertheless, a variety of COVID-19 related manuscripts got published in the previous issues of the IJA. [ 20 21 22 23 24 25 26 27 28 29 30 31 32 33 34 35 36 37 38 39 40 ]…”