Barriers In Healthcare

The U.S. Healthcare System is a much overburdened system. There are many factors that contribute to this such as the increasing population, aging population, lack of insurance, or being underinsured. Other contributing factors are the insufficient number of healthcare providers and with the introduction of The Affordable Care Act increasing numbers of newly insured people. All these factors just add to the already struggling system and the access people have to it. This then leads to utilization of other strained healthcare areas such the overuse of emergency rooms for non-emergent needs. As you can see many barriers exist that keep people from very basic healthcare. Telemedicine is the direction healthcare needs to take to help take the burden off our system and promote longer and healthier lives.
A. Telemedicine will fill the void where there is not enough access to healthcare providers. As Merritt Hawkins (2014) reports from their survey currently patients typically have to wait for a new Primary Care Physician (PCP) appointment approximately 19.5 days and 18.5 days for a specialist appointment. Also noteworthy is that the survey reveals “…a family physician ranged from a high of 66 days in Boston to …show more content…
Utilization of High-Intensity Telemedicine especially for the elderly will be very important in patient outcomes. The High-Intensity Telemedicine model that Shah et al (2013) suggests consists of not only videoconferencing as traditional telemedicine does but incorporating other aspects of medicine. They will have people called certified telemedicine assistants (CTAs),that go to the patient’s house and obtain their history, vital signs, EKGs, and collect blood and urine. The information is put into the electronic medical records and reviewed by a physician who will then contact the patient and create a treatment plan for the acute illness. This has the potential to provide older adults with timely, high quality, patient-centered acute care they will