CHAPTER ONE

INTRODUCTION

1.1 Background of the Study

Worldwide, people living in rural and remote areas struggle to access timely, quality specialty medical care. Residents of these areas often have access to substandard specialty healthcare, primarily because specialist physicians are more likely to be located in areas of concentrated population. There is also the challenge of having very few experts especially those managing chronic diseases even in the urban areas. Effective management of diseases especially chronic diseases can result in improved health outcomes and increased quality of life since more than 80% of primary care visits and two thirds of medical admissions into hospital emergency departments are related to chronic diseases. For example, controlling a parameter such as blood pressure in people with diabetes and hypertension has been shown to reduce mortality and incidence of severe and costly complications such as renal and cardiovascular disease. 

Health care systems are now changing due to the dynamic nature of technological and scientific medical practices. The health care providers are now swiftly adopting these technologies into their health care procedures. Because of innovations in computing and communication technologies, many elements of medical practice can be accomplished when the patient and health care provider are geographically separated. The separation can be as small as across a town, across a state or even across the world. 

Remote patient monitoring is relatively a new area of interest which enables medical professionals to monitor a patient remotely using various technological devices. It is primarily used for monitoring chronic diseases or specific diseases like heart diseases, diabetes mellitus, and hypertension e.t.c. These services can provide comparable health outcomes to traditional inpatient encounters, supply greater satisfaction to patients and is cost effective. Monitoring a patient at home or in a clinic without a resident expert using known device like blood pressure monitors, glucose meters e.t.c. and transferring the information to a caregiver is a fast growing emerging service.

In developing countries like South Africa, Primary Remote Diagnostic Consultation [1] not only monitors an already diagnosed chronic disease but has the promise to diagnosing and managing the disease a patient will typically visit a general practitioner for. Remote patient monitoring can also be applied in electrocardiography, radiology, to mention but a few.

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