Dee W. Ford (editor) - Telemedicine: Overview and Application in Pulmonary, Critical Care, and Sleep Medicine (Respiratory Medicine)

More information about this series at http://www.springer.com/series/7665 Respiratory Medicine offers clinical and research-oriented resources for pulmonologists and other practitioners and researchers interested in respiratory care. Spanning a broad range of clinical and research issues in respiratory medicine, the series covers such topics as COPD, asthma and allergy, pulmonary problems in pregnancy, molecular basis of lung disease, sleep disordered breathing, and others.

The series editors are Sharon Rounds, MD, Professor of Medicine and of Pathology and Laboratory Medicine at the Alpert Medical School at Brown University, Anne Dixon, MD, Professor of Medicine and Director of the Division of Pulmonary and Critical Care at Robert Larner, MD College of Medicine at the University of Vermont, and Lynn M. Schnapp, MD, George R. And Elaine Love Professor and Chair of Medicine at the University of Wisconsin-Madison School of Medicine and Public Health.

This Humana imprint is published by the registered company Springer Nature Switzerland AG

The registered company address is: Gewerbestrasse 11, 6330 Cham, Switzerland

When we embarked on editing a telehealth book, we could not have envisioned the rapid uptake in telehealth that would occur associated with the COVID-19 global pandemic. Our original vision was to provide an introductory overview of themes relevant to virtually all telehealth programs along with a detailed examination of telehealth in pulmonary, critical care, and sleep medicine. We have termed the first part of this book a telehealth primer. The objective of the primer is not to provide a comprehensive manual on telehealth, but is to give readers a valuable overview of topics that need to be considered, addressed, and adapted to the readers local context. Primer topics include an overview of the history of telehealth, regulatory/legal issues, financial considerations, historical challenges to telehealth service development and implementation, technology considerations, people factors in telehealth, and how telehealth can drive quality in healthcare. The second section provides an evidence-based review of telehealth services in select pulmonary/sleep medicine topics including pediatric asthma, home-based chronic obstructive pulmonary disease management, and sleep disordered breathing. This is followed by a detailed chapter on telemergency including examples of triage tools for telemergency programs. Finally, the book concludes with a chapter on tele-ICU, arguably the area with the most robust evidence base. We hope readers find this a useful introduction to this important topic and an area of indisputable growth in healthcare.