Accepted for/Published in: Journal of Medical Internet Research
Date Submitted: Oct 5, 2020
Date Accepted: Jan 16, 2021
Date Submitted to PubMed: Jan 21, 2021
Warning: This is an author submission that is not peer-reviewed or edited. Preprints - unless they show as "accepted" - should not be relied on to guide clinical practice or health-related behavior and should not be reported in news media as established information.
Telehealth in the COVID-19 Era: A Balancing Act to Avoid Harm
ABSTRACT
The telehealth revolution has been heralded for its potential to improve health care access and improve the efficiency of health care delivery. However, virtual patient care can bring unintended consequences that eclipse the benefits including potentially limiting the patient-provider relationship, the quality of the examination, the efficiency of healthcare delivery, and the overall quality of care. Facing the most rapidly adopted medical trend in modern history, clinicians are beginning to grasp its possibilities, but we also need to understand its boundaries. As outcomes are studied and federal regulations reconsidered, it is important to be precise in the approach to the virtual patient encounter. We offer some simple guidelines to assist providers in determining the appropriateness of a telehealth visit, considering visit types, chief complaint or disease states, and patient characteristics.
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Copyright
© The authors. All rights reserved. This is a privileged document currently under peer-review/community review (or an accepted/rejected manuscript). Authors have provided JMIR Publications with an exclusive license to publish this preprint on it's website for review and ahead-of-print citation purposes only. While the final peer-reviewed paper may be licensed under a cc-by license on publication, at this stage authors and publisher expressively prohibit redistribution of this draft paper other than for review purposes.