“Telemedicine is one of the priorities of the National Health Service for patient associations in the midst of the health emergency and in the post-Covid period. For over a year there has been a strong push from the entire associative world to compete with this innovation. various waves of the pandemic, many associations have changed their way of working and introduced extreme digitization. Good news, however there are critical issues “. Like this Teresa Petrangolini, director of Patient Advocacy Lab Atems (High School of Economics and Management of Health Systems of the Catholic University of Rome), during the online event ‘The importance of telemedicine in haemophilia, the REmoTe project’, organized by the Observatory for rare diseases.
“Among the problems we encountered – he underlines – there is certainly the difficulty on the part of patients in using the programs, followed by lack of connections, little information and training, unfamiliarity with some devices, distrust. At the same time, however, we discovered that patients are not explained how to use the Apps, while it is important to accompany telemedicine with the simplification of procedures. As if that weren’t enough, only 18% of the clinics were involved with patient associations. But if we really want to to bet on these tools, they must be involved right away, even in programming. In this case it becomes a successful experience, otherwise the risk is that the new tools, even if they work, do not give the same results that we would like to achieve “.
“From a research” conducted by Altems, Petrangolini points out, “it emerges that most of the 150 patient associations we involved in the survey want to continue to keep the organizational changes they implemented during the pandemic, including the push towards the use of all innovative tools, and telemedicine is one of them. Surely it is good news, but then when it comes to the merits there are needs that must be respected: the first visit, for example, must always be done in presence “.
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