Self-Management of Asthma Using Telemedicine.

Objective: Asthma is common, affecting an estimated 300 million people worldwide. Telemedicine, the use of telecommunications technology to deliver care at a distance has reached a maturity, which can effectively support the promotion of health, reduction of treatment costs, prevention and self- management of chronic diseases like Diabetes, hypertension and asthma. The aim of this paper is to investigate effectiveness of self-management of asthma using telemedicine. Material and Methods: A systematic review of application of telemedicine for improving asthma controlling was performed. The electronic articles published between November 2006 and November 2016 indexed in Pubmed were reviewed using asthma, self-management and telemedicine, telehealth and other related terms as keywords. Numbers of 94 articles focusing on asthma management through telemedicine were found. After removing articles which were not available in full text format (n=48) and duplicated papers (n=6), two reviewers screened titles and abstracts of these articles on the basis of inclusion criteria. The remaining articles matched with inclusion criteria (n=37) were reviewed in full text, and finally 21 publications were included based on eligibility criteria in the review. Results: Studied telemedicine systems were developed based on various technologies such as web (n=9), mobile (n=5), telephone (n=3) and computers (n=3). In the previous studies telemedicine has used for education (n=5) and self- management (n=11) of asthmatic patient and intervention duration ranged from 0.5 to 24 months. In addition, many of authors reported effectiveness of telemedicine by various sets of quality measures such as improvement of asthma self-management (n=12),access and patient-centered communication with physicians (n=4), adherence to asthma medications (n=2), quality of life (n=3) and reduction of planned or unplanned visits to a health care professional for asthma- related concerns (n=3),number of days lost from work or study due to asthma (n=1) and potentially long-distance travels to see specialists (n=2). Conclusion: This study provides insight into effectiveness of interventions based on telemedicine for asthmatic patient. Few studies have addressed Clinical effectiveness and cost-effectiveness of treatments for patients so future research should be focused on assessing the (cost-clinical) effectiveness of implementation strategies. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]