The role of Telehealth in addressing patients’ needs in the wake of the COVID-19 pandemic cannot possibly be overstated. Therefore, developing additional tools that will enhance the process of collaboration and communication between a patient and a healthcare provider is a vital step toward making healthcare more accessible and effective. Therefore, the project described in the post above is quite fascinating and worthy of support.
Specifically, it will be exciting to see how the issue of cultural and language barriers will be addressed with the help of the specified initiative (Khoong et al., 2021). While access to care is currently impeded primarily by the risk factors associated with the coronavirus, a range of non-English-speaking patients fail to receive the necessary services not only due to the pandemic, but also due to the loss of few opportunities for overcoming the language barrier and cross-cultural issues.
Remarkably, the issue of cross-cultural misconceptions and the need for improving the Telehealth framework in relation to the language- and culture-related misunderstandings has been the source of concern for a range of health experts.
For instance, the study by Hilty et al. (2020) outlines the challenges faced by minority patients when accessing health services via Telehealth. Thus, additional opportunities for utilizing resources for maintaining nurse-patient communication in the cross-cultural settings must be sought (Nittari et al., 2020). Thus, it will be fascinating to see how the described concern is resolved with the help of the project described above. Specifically, the development of cultural competencies in nurses and other healthcare experts who will be involved in Telehealth-based patient support is worth discussing.
References
Hilty, D. M., Gentry, M. T., McKean, A. J., Cowan, K. E., Lim, R. F., & Lu, F. G. (2020). Telehealth for rural diverse populations: Telebehavioral and cultural competencies, clinical outcomes and administrative approaches. mHealth, 6, 1-19. Web.
Khoong, E. C., Butler, B. A., Mesina, O., Su, G., DeFries, T. B., Nijagal, M., & Lyles, C. R. (2021). Patient interest in and barriers to telemedicine video visits in a multilingual urban safety-net system. Journal of the American Medical Informatics Association, 28(2), 349-353. Web.
Nittari, G., Khuman, R., Baldoni, S., Pallotta, G., Battineni, G., Sirignano, A., Amenta, F., & Ricci, G. (2020). Telemedicine practice: Review of the current ethical and legal challenges. Telemedicine and e-Health, 26(12), 1427-1437. Web.