TELEMEDICINE AND HEALTH POLICY CHANGES IN RESPONSE TO RESTRICTIONS RELATED TO COVID-19 PANDEMICS IN LATVIA

Abstract

Objective: Remote consultations are quickly emerging to give more access to real-time, high-quality, efficient, and cost-effective healthcare in the current COVID-19 pandemic.Objective is to investigate the changing experiences of remote consulting for patients in Latvia and plan effective health policies, to provide a full analysis of the policy for telemedicine applications and solutions based on the current conditions.; Design and Method: Materials and approaches include an examination of normative documents as well as a variety of informational sources. The information offered is mostly based on national strategy papers, official reports, and scientefic publications on Tele-medicine implementation.; Results: Telemedicine's range will continue to expand, connecting patients and providers internationally as providers look to expand globally. This will not only help improve the long-term policies about health but may also provide patients with rare diseases alternative avenues to seek highly specialized care. Telemedicine strategy must react faster than ever during the COVID-19 epidemic. Latvia has reacted to Covid pandemics and have noticable implemented new possibilities to provide new approaches provided by telemedicine: providing remote consutlations to patients in different sectors, using E-referrals that were implemented but not sufficiently used before, providing more possibilites to provide remote services also for consiliums, physician-physiscan online consultations. New ICT tools were used for patient remote monitoring. The normative regulation, stategical decisions and changes in long-term policy documents haven't been changed, so there are limitations to provide the telemedice expansion or stable use after the emengency situation ends. Health policies about telemedicine have another key role with to pursuing that.; Conclusions: Telemedicine is fast expanding, demand for this service is rising. Although not a replacement for face-to-face consultations, this study illustrates that remote consulting can be an acceptable adjunct to traditional face-to-face consultations. More research is required to identify overall safety and applicability. Digital Health Strategy in Latvia is still on developing stage. Changes or legislation to clarify Telemedicine are still in the process. It is important to provide a good environment for Telemedicine to expand, setting strategies and visions on how those new approaches will be regulating normatively and administratively. (Copyright © 2022 Wolters Kluwer Health, Inc. All rights reserved.)