Abstract
Telehealth has emerged as a model of modern technology for health care services in Vietnam during the COVID-19 pandemic. To actively prevent the outbreak of COVID-19 by using a national digital transformation program, the Vietnamese Ministry of Health launched project 2628/Quyet dinh-Bo y te, which approved a scheme for remote medical examinations and treatments for 2020 to 2025. The project aims to connect 1000 hospitals to strengthen the quality of medical services by using the expertise of central hospitals to support rural areas via provincial hospitals. Phutho General Hospital (PGH) is one of leading provincial hospitals that participated in and applied the early telehealth systems in Vietnam. By using telehealth systems, PGH can offer valuable support to doctors’ activities by streamlining and facilitating their work. Telehealth was demonstrated to be feasible, acceptable, and effective at PGH in Vietnam, and it resulted in considerable improvements in health care outcomes. The COVID-19 pandemic has facilitated the acceleration and enhancement of telehealth in Vietnam. The success of telehealth in Phutho may be a useful reference for other parts of the world. However, this telehealth system focuses on the connectivity among doctors rather than the connectivity between doctors and patients, which is an area that needs further assessment.
Highlights
Since the outbreak of COVID-19, which originated in Wuhan, China, in 2020, the disease has spread widely across the world [1,2]
This paper aims to present the results of applying telehealth in Vietnam at Phutho General Hospital (PGH), which is the largest provincial hospital in the northwest region of Vietnam, as well as the advantages and challenges of early-stage telehealth in Vietnam
Telehealth has emerged as a model of modern technology for health care services in Vietnam during the COVID-19 outbreak
Summary
Since the outbreak of COVID-19, which originated in Wuhan, China, in 2020, the disease has spread widely across the world [1,2]. The project aims to reduce the burden on central hospitals, increase the quality of medical examination and treatment in primary health care facilities, save costs, and improve patients’ experiences and satisfaction while ensuring the safety of medical staff, doctors, and patients during the COVID-19 pandemic. The telehealth network was high in quality and resulted in faster decision making, shorter diagnosis times, faster and better patient management, shorter lengths of hospitalization and intensive care unit stays, improved diagnostic accuracy in triage, reduced anxiety, better education, increased confidence, and fewer unnecessary procedures. Another breakthrough of telemedicine in PGH was successfully applying telemedicine in surgery. The benefits of telemedicine are obvious when it comes to social distancing and decreasing the spread of diseases
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