Telehealth

Telehealth is a broad term that includes the use of technology to provide medically-related care to patients. A common application of telemedicine is provision of care through telephone or web-based visits with your provider. Rapidly emerging is the use of digital health that includes the use of smartphone-based disease management, “wearables” to monitor physiologic measures, and digital inhalers.

Digital inhalers are an important new advance in the management of asthma. These digital inhalers include ones that a Bluetooth sensor is built into or is attached to the inhaler. Digital technology is available for almost all inhalers in the US. If prescribed, these devices help monitor medication use and, with at least one type of inhaler, whether the patient has used proper inhaler technique to improve delivery of the medication into the lungs. Data collected through these digital inhalers is available to the patient and, under some circumstances, to the healthcare provider.