Telemedicine

Abstract

Telemedicine has been advocated as a solution to overcome barriers to access health services faced by rural patients. The almost 60 million Americans living in rural areas are significantly underserved by the nation’s physicians and rural communities have traditionally experienced a shortage of physicians. Compounding this problem of physician shortage is the fact that services must be provided to patients over a wide geographic area.

Telemedicine programs are being used to address health services shortages in rural areas by applying telecommunications technology to deliver health services similar to those which would be provided in face-to-face consultations between patients and health care professionals. Adoption of telemedicine as an option for delivery of services has been slow and is largely limited to specialty services. Where adopted, telemedicine has been received positively by both patients and physicians. Telemedicine can improve access to care for rural patients by increasing the number of patients who can access care and by providing services usually unavailable to rural patients. Despite evidence of the effectiveness of telemedicine programs, wider adoption of a telemedicine alternative suffers from a lack of reliable financial data for implementation, ongoing management, and for comparison to traditional delivery systems. Telemedicine is poised to become an important method of rural health care delivery, but as the trend toward the application of technology to the delivery of health services gains greater momentum, health managers require serious quantitative evidence on which to base resource allocation and management decisions.