Telehealth in long-term neurological conditions: the potential, the challenges and the key recommendations

Abstract

Long-term neurological conditions (LTNCs) cause physical and psychological symptoms that have a significant impact on activities of daily living and quality of life. Multidisciplinary teams are effective at providing treatment for people with LTNCs; however, access to such services by people with disabilities can be difficult and as a result, good quality care is not universal. One potential solution is telehealth. This review describes the potential of telehealth to support people with LTNCs, the challenges of designing and implementing these systems, and the key recommendations for those involved in telehealth to facilitate connected services that can benefit patients, carers and healthcare professionals. These recommendations include understanding the problems posed by LTNCs and the needs of the end-user through a person-centred approach. We discuss how to work collaboratively and use shared learning, and consider how to effectively evaluate the intervention at every stage of the development process.

Keywords:

• Long-term neurological conditions
• telehealth
• person-centred approach
• complex interventions

Acknowledgements

CJM is an NIHR Research Professor.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Data availability statement

Data sharing is not applicable to this article as no new data were created or analysed in this study.

Additional information

Funding

The technology development and research reported in this publication was supported by a National Institute for Health Research (NIHR) Doctoral Research Fellowship under Grant (DRF-2013-06-076), the Motor Neurone Disease Association, the NIHR Sheffield Biomedical Research Centre (Translational Neuroscience) (IS-BRC-1215-20017) and the NIHR Devices for Dignity MedTech Co-operative.