Pros and cons of telemedicine in diagnosis and management: A cross sectional survey
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Heba A Yassa 1 * , Aliae AR Mohamed Hussein 2 , Hoda A Makhlouf 2 , Nahed A Makhlouf 3 , Hadeer Mahmoud S Youssef 4 , Rehab SA Sotohy 4 , Abdelhakeem A Essa 5
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1 Forensic Medicine and Clinical Toxicology Department, Faculty of Medicine, Assiut University, Assiut, EGYPT2 Pulmonology Department, Faculty of Medicine, Assiut University, Assiut, EGYPT3 Tropical Medicine and Gastroenterology Department, Faculty of Medicine, Assiut University, Assiut, EGYPT4 Faculty of Medicine, Assiut University, Assiut, EGYPT5 Neurosurgery Department, Faculty of Medicine, Assiut University, Assiut, EGYPT* Corresponding Author

Abstract

Introduction: Cost effectiveness, equity, and quality all are problems facing the health care services in both developed and developing countries. Modern technologies as telemedicine tried to help population especially in epidemics. Many malpractice problems facing doctors and other health care workers due to using telemedicine. This study aimed to clarify the pros and cons of telemedicine.
Method: Survey was done and validated to health care worker sectors, patients and judicial workers sectors, to evaluate the telemedicine according to their practice.
Results: about one thousand volunteers shared in this study, 616 (61.3%), 68 (6.8%) judicial workers, and 320 (31.9%) other jobs. Most of doctors 95% of them refuse to use telemedicine in the provisional diagnosis, 77.3% claim that it is very difficult to give accurate diagnosis through media, 75.6% of them convinced that telemedicine and increase the malpractice issues and medical responsibilities. In judicial workers 64.7% of them prove that there is increase in malpractice issues due to use of media. On the other side 55% of the other job sectors agree with the use of telemedicine especially in time of epidemics.
Conclusion: Telemedicine has many pros and cons. The main cons were that the inability to give the actual diagnosis and occurrence of medical errors, while the main pros was that the use of telemedicine to follow up already diagnosed patient. Governments should legalize the using of telemedicine by enacting law that prohibit the use of it except between doctors to take medical decision or exchange opinion.

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This is an open access article distributed under the Creative Commons Attribution License which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.

Article Type: Original Article

ELECTRON J GEN MED, 2022, Volume 19, Issue 5, Article No: em394

https://doi.org/10.29333/ejgm/12236

Publication date: 16 Jul 2022

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