Over the years, telemedicine is expanding in the USA and has a positive impact on HIV care. It results in reduced transmission rates and increased patient/provider satisfaction.
In retrospective research, the Open Forum Infectious Diseases found telemedicine visits to be equally beneficial as in-person visits for suppressing and managing viral load in individuals with HIV.
Researchers looked at the records of both groups of patients between May 2017 and April 2018. They found that a telemedicine group fared better than an in-person care group.
Telemedicine consultations can have many benefits. You don’t need to travel in person for these visits, which means you can save time and effort on your commute. There’s also the added benefit of having something like streaming video to keep you updated throughout consultations.
There are many other factors to consider when deciding on a location’s suitability for HIV patients. The study’s findings were that HIV patients who are rural-based have worse prognoses than those who reside in an urban area.
A study published in the American Journal of Family Medicine found that telemedicine for HIV patients in rural Georgia yielded comparable results as in-person care.
To reach their goals for the study, the researchers tested a treatment called anti-viral treatment on everyone in the study group. The objective was to make sure that there was no negative correlation between the efficacy of this treatment and the age, race, and gender characteristics of participants.
82% of patients in the telemedicine group and 50% in the in-person group had a CD4 count greater than or equal to 643 cells/mm3. The results were all statistically significant.
The study compared treatment outcomes for patients in two groups-those who received traditional face-to-face therapy and those who used a video conferencing platform. Although the group that used computer-based methods showed reduced improvement at first, this difference disappeared over time.
The research offers hope that telemedicine could seem like the solution for those rural areas with the highest level of access to care issues.
Telemedicine is a helpful resource for the long-term management of chronic diseases such as HIV in locations without local physicians.