Benefit of Telemedicine

Telehealth is “the practice of healthcare delivery using telecommunications technology including but not limited to diagnosis, consultation, treatment, transfer of medical data, education, dissemination of public health alerts and/or emergency updates”. Telemedicine is “the use of telecommunications technology to deliver clinical diagnosis, services and patient consultation”.1 Applications can be real-time or store-and-forward. For the purposes of this paper we limit discussion solely to telemedicine, recognizing the many inter-locking linkages with the larger topic of telehealth.
The costs of health care impose an enormous burden on the economy. The latest projections from the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services show that annual health-care expenditures are expected to reach $3.1 trillion by 2012, growing at an average annual rate of 7.3% during the forecast period or 17.7% of gross domestic product, up from 14.1% today.2 Telemedicine will become a multi-billion dollar industry.3 But just what are the benefits of telemedicine?4, 5

Many potential benefits of telemedicine can be envisaged and include:

a) Economic Development and Quality of Life Perspective
b) Patient's perspective
c) Provider's perspective