A virtual telehealth framework: Applications and technical considerations

Since last two decades, telehealth has been emerged into an expansion of telemedicine. A telehealth system provides the curative care and preventive care. In telehealth, patient's data is sent by email to a physician or a medical expert for diagnosis and medical prescription. Telehealth system can be used as real time method or store forward method. However, in perspective of developing countries like Pakistan, real-time telehealth is not feasible due to its high cost. Whereas, the store and forward method based telehealth can be a cost-effect solution. It has been identified that a major problem with store-and-forward method is long time-factor that can be longer to 48 hours in certain cases. The situation may become more verse if patient is in serious condition and requires immediate medication. To address this issue a concept of virtual telehealth is proposed in this paper. We have incorporated a clinical decision support system to reply the patients' query locally. The presented solution can make telehealth more financially feasible, technically implemental in developing countries like Pakistan.