Patient's perspective

Access to healthcare

Access to quality, state of the art health care in underserved areas, such as rural communities, is one of the most important promised benefits of telemedicine. Rural residents are not second-class citizens; they deserve access to health care services that those in metropolitan areas enjoy. Over 55 million people (20% of the U.S. population) reside in rural America and having local quality health care is important to them.

Saves time, travel, and other expenses

Telemedicine entails moving from a service delivery system in which patients (and often parent or guardian) physically travel from a rural area where they reside to an urban area to consult with a medical specialist, to a system in which the specialist consults with the patient and rural primary care provider using telecommunications facilities. An obvious opportunity is the potential for transportation cost savings, such as the potential for saving a portion of the millions spent annually on patient automobile travel expenses, emergency air evacuations or other forms of transporting patients across the large expanses of rural America.

Healthcare at home

Home care and community based health services are becoming an increasingly important part of the healthcare service continuum. There are many reasons for this including: patients are leaving hospital sooner and need some additional care at home while they recover, treating patients at home is less expensive than treating them in the hospital, many patients prefer to stay in their homes as long as possible before moving onto a higher level of healthcare service, e.g. nursing home, hospice. A research project found that telehome care allowed home care nurses to "see" more patients in a day, decreased the visit time and ended up costing 33-50% less than the traditional home care visit.

Health provider integration

Improved collaboration between providers (e.g., shared access to electronic medical records and provider to provider consultations) provides patients with enhanced confidence that all that can be done is being done.

Comfort-level with the technology

Television and computer applications are more common and not a foreign concept. Patients are now more at ease and accepting of the use of this application of technology.