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What is Telemedicine?
Telemedicine is the use of data by healthcare professionals in evaluating, diagnosing, and treating patients from a distance using telecommunications technology. The approach has been through a striking evolution in the 21st century and is fast becoming an increasingly important part of the healthcare infrastructure.
According to the World Health Organization, telemedicine is defined as the delivery of healthcare services, where distance is a critical factor, by all healthcare professionals using information and communication technologies for the exchange of valid information for the diagnosis, treatment, and prevention of disease and injuries, research and evaluation and for the continuing education of healthcare providers, all in the interests of advancing the health of individuals and their communities.
BACKGROUND
The advent of telemedicine began in the 1950s when a few hospital systems and university medical centers started to try to find ways to share information and images via telephone. It was used mostly to connect doctors working with a patient in one location to specialists somewhere else. This was beneficial to rural populations where specialists weren’t readily available. Throughout the next decades, the equipment necessary to conduct remote visits remained expensive and complex, so the use of the approach, while growing, was limited.
With the rise of the internet age, profound changes occurred in the practice of telemedicine. The usage of smart devices, high-quality video transmission, opened up ways to deliver remote healthcare to patients in their homes as an alternative to in-person visits for both primary and specialty care.
BENEFITS
Using telemedicine as an alternative to in-person visits has a lot of benefits for both patients and providers.
For patients, telemedicine enables less time away from work, no travel expense, less interference with the child or eldercare responsibilities, maintaining privacy, and no exposure to other potentially contagious patients.
Providers enjoy increased revenue, improved office efficiency, an answer to the competitive threat of retail health clinics and online-only providers, better patient follow-through and improved health outcomes, fewer missed appointments and cancellations, and private payer reimbursement.