Telemedicine: a technological revolution

Abstract

Telemedicine and telehealth are terms that encompass the use of communications technology for the purposes of healthcare, which might be in relation to dissemination of knowledge, or in relation to patient care at a remote consultation office by a specialist, and so on. This segment of medicine already has a history of around 40 years of evolution, and thus is no longer so new, yet it is regarded with mistrust by many professionals. Nevertheless, telemedicine is clearly growing in a sustained manner. Initiatives and programs based on telemedicine are increasingly present in modern medical practice.The United States is not only the birthplace of telemedicine but also a country in which its practice is firmly consolidated. Some examples of its application within American medicine include: remote monitoring of vital signs; transmission of images for interpretation and production of reports on radiological, anatomopathological and cardiological examinations, among others; patient consultations via teleconferencing; continuing medical education; information portals aimed towards patients; quick-consultation medical information applications for wireless devices; remote advice from specialist physicians to general practitioners in contact with patients; and data-gathering for clinical research; among many other uses. The American Telemedicine Association is a not-for-profit association founded in 1993 that has the aim of developing and organizing telemedicine within the United States. It has listed the following benefits from using telemedicine: 1 1. Ease of access: through telemedicine, high-value medical information can even reach and be obtained from remote areas, without the need for patients or professional teams to move from their locations; 2. Cost reduction: as well as the reduced need for transportation and decreased length of hospital stay, the greater efficiency of treatment attained gives rise to better use of resources with less waste; 3. Greater convenience for patients: reduction of the need to travel and the rapid reaction of the medical team to any appearance of change produce greater satisfaction among patients and members of their families.A good perspective on the growth within this field can be obtained by searching for the terms telemedicine and telehealth in the PubMed database, which yields 14,748 items, among which the earliest is dated 1974. It can be seen that the number of published papers on this topic per year remained small until the 1990s, when this rate shot up from just a few to hundreds of studies. This increasing trend continued through the 2000s to reach a peak in 2011, with a total of 1,224 indexed published papers. Many studies have proven that good results are achieved through using telemedicine in its various aspects. In 2012, Weaver and Murdock demonstrated the value of telemedicine for primary screening for retinopathy associated with prematurity. In a study evaluating a total of 582 examinations, all performed remotely, on a population of 137 premature neonates, these authors...

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