Telemedicine applications for pandemic diseases, with a focus on COVID-19

Dating back to the development of modern medicine, pandemic and epidemic diseases, such as bubonic plague, smallpox, the plague of Justinian, and the Antonine Plague, have caused massive damage to the human race. For instance, more than 200 million people are estimated to have died due to Black Death (bubonic plague) alone. This situation has not changed in near history either. Diseases such as influenza, HIV/AIDS, severe acute respiratory syndrome, Ebola, Middle East respiratory syndrome, and coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19), as today, have emerged and threatened the modern human life. The common feature of these diseases can be listed as having a high risk of infection and transmission, rapidly spreading to large areas, and having high mortality rates and causing permanent damage to the body because of the low immunity profile of the exposed population. If the number of cases increases rapidly for these diseases, the capacity of healthcare services can be exceeded and healthcare services can be threatened as well. These characteristics of pandemic diseases force the authorities to take extraordinary precautions such as isolation and quarantine to reduce the risk of infection. However, these applications can make it difficult to provide proper health services to patients. The development of information technologies provides patients an easy and remote access to healthcare services via telemedicine applications. Telemedicine is used for diagnosis and treatment of diseases by following the same practices used in clinics. It also provides care givers a real-time and remote monitoring of their patients, which can be beneficial in terms of reducing the risk of infections and maintaining healthcare services during a pandemic. Authorities can also use these telemedicine applications to track infected patients and get necessary precaution to minimize the infection risk. This chapter introduces the latest telemedicine applications for epidemic and pandemic diseases, especially for COVID-19. These potential applications could improve and transform the current practices for pandemic disease management.