Telemedicine for home health and the new patient: when do we really need to go to the hospital?

This chapter will review the current state-of-the-art of home health services in the telemedicine environment. Two aspects in particular will be discussed that reflect where most of the efforts in home telehealth care are being directed. The first aspect is the more traditional implementation in which the healthcare practitioner "visits" the patient (typically chronically ill or at home recovering from a hospital visit) virtually at a distance using telemedicine technologies to assess their health status, obtain a select set of vital signs (e.g., blood pressure), and converse with them about how they feel and so on. The second application is the growing field of distance monitoring, especially as it pertains to prevention and health maintenance. In this application, the users may be patients with chronic conditions such as asthma or diabetes that require regular monitoring to achieve or maintain healthy functioning, but they are typically not in an acute phase. More and more often, however, the users of distance monitoring technologies are relatively healthy people looking to enhance their health awareness and healthy status by monitoring various vital signs to alert them of any potential changes in their health status that would require actual medical attention.