Abstract
Telehealth, which is the delivery of healthcare services at a distance using information and telecommunications technology, has increased healthcare access to rural and remote communities and helped to reduce the cost of health care while improving the wellness of patients. We drew from the literature to show how telehealth has helped patients maintain wellness by managing chronic and debilitating conditions and evaluating patients’ experiences of clinical outcomes from various telehealth strategies and enabling technologies. This evidence-based study confirmed that the use of telehealth services is invaluable for self-management, monitoring, diagnosis, prevention and alleviation of the symptoms of different disease conditions. Telehealth was also identified to be efficient in glycaemic control and body weight loss for patients with diabetes, minimisation of anxiety through nursing care for patients with mental illness and effectively reducing some of the biomarkers of chronic conditions such as cancer and cardiovascular diseases. Many challenges such as high cost of infrastructure, poor legislative framework, data safety and security, poor interoperability of electronic medical records (EMRs) and the preference of face-to-face business model are still hampering telehealth. However, with the gradual changes in some of the laws governing telehealth due to COVID-19, there is a possibility of an enhanced acceptance of the technology. This will give room for greater investments in the infrastructure facilities, which will guarantee greater access of the technology to the population in rural communities and enable the treatment of more diseases.