Pediatric Telehealth: Less Trips to the Doctor’s Office?

Want to learn about how telehealth practices are being applied to help care for your child? Keep reading!

Yet another aspect of patient care that telehealth covers and is worth learning about is pediatrics. Pediatrics is the branch of medicine that deals with medical care for infants, children, and adolescents. Being a part of Connect Wolf, a baby tech company, I am very interested in children’s healthcare, and how the medical industry approaches topics like children’s development and other conditions.

Telehealth has been used to study pediatrics, mainly healthcare for serious illnesses and conditions that impact children’s mental and physical development and daily lifestyles. Similar to other branches of medicine, telehealth has been used as an addition to in-person visits, and one of its popular uses has been for more challenged rural and inner-city families. Studies from the American Academy of Pediatrics have also shown the benefits of telehealth for both acute and chronic disease management. Read more about it here!

An interesting advantage of pediatric telehealth services that hadn’t occurred to me was the lessened number of school absences that children would have. For kids who live in rural and inner-city areas, catching the school bus or having parents drive them to school may already be a big enough day-to-day challenge. So I understand how missing a day of school to drive even further for a doctor’s appointment would be an obstacle, or even convince parents to delay their child’s medical appointments. Not to mention parents having to take leave off work too.

In urgent medical situations, children may need immediate care or expertise but cannot get to a healthcare facility in time if they live in distant rural or inner-city regions. In this situation, telehealth allows patients to get in touch with the specialists they need through live, interactive videoconferencing. These visits are common for children and infants that have unanticipated specialty needs for their acute diseases. Specialists can also be contacted using telehealth services if children are able to reach a hospital, but the specialists they need are not available at the hospital during their emergency visit.

There are a lot of factors that have to be considered to successfully apply telehealth measures to pediatrics — technological equipment and infrastructure, privacy between physicians and patients, support personnel available, and countless others. While more research has to be conducted on how different regions will adopt telehealth practices for pediatrics, telehealth’s current uses make its future in pediatrics look very promising!