Telemedicine in Rural Areas

Improving healthcare with telemedicine in rural areas

As the number of hospitals in rural communities continues to contract, healthcare organizations are successfully caring for patients by providing telemedicine in rural areas. Rather than require patients to spend hours driving to doctors’ offices and healthcare facilities that are far from home, healthcare providers are using telehealth technology for video and voice conferencing as well as remote monitoring to enable individuals to receive care in their homes or local doctor’s office.

Telemedicine in rural areas may include telehealth services such as:
 

• Virtual office visits that enable anytime, anywhere contact with primary care physicians for everyday health issues, and contact with specialists for acute and chronic conditions.
• Telesurgery operations that enable surgeons hundreds or thousands of miles away to perform robotic surgery on patients at facilities close to home.
• Telepsychiatry sessions that enable patients to seek mental and behavioral health treatment from the comfort of home.
• Remote monitoring of high-risk patients to manage chronic conditions such as heart disease, stroke, asthma and diabetes, enabling physicians to track patient progress and make sure that they are adhering to treatment plans that can prevent readmission to the hospital.
   

Network requirements for providing telemedicine in rural areas

To support the practice of telemedicine in rural areas, healthcare providers need a medical practice or hospital network that can deliver the bandwidth, availability and minimal latency required by sophisticated health information technology.

Many applications and technologies developed to provide telemedicine in rural areas involve bandwidth-intensive data transfer. From photos and videos required for medical imaging to audio transcripts of procedures and diagnostics, medical data often resides in extremely large files. Providers need network services that can guarantee a high, dedicated bandwidth at all times to ensure timely delivery of files. Minimal latency is also critical to delivering telemedicine in rural areas, especially for telesurgery. And always-on availability of medical data is essential for reducing errors in diagnosis, accelerating claim processing and promoting collaboration between remote practitioners.

Spectrum Enterprise: technology solutions for telemedicine in rural areas

Spectrum Enterprise is a leading provider of fiber technology and network solutions for healthcare organizations throughout the United States, providing comprehensive solutions that make it easier to practice telemedicine in rural areas.
 

• Our secure, fast and reliable fiber network enables organizations to securely manage and access bandwidth-intensive patient data.
• Reliable and scalable hospital phone and voice solutions enable patients and clinicians to connect more easily using advanced collaboration tools.
• Managed Router and WiFi services allow IT teams to outsource management and monitoring of key technologies and to focus on other priorities that help deliver telemedicine in rural areas. Our HD video solutions also provides HDTV programming for waiting rooms and hospital rooms to improve the patient experience.
   

With Spectrum Enterprise, healthcare organizations have a partner that can help to make providing telemedicine in rural areas simpler and more affordable.