What is Telemedicine? (Part 1: The Technical Definition)

So, what exactly is Telemedicine?

Basically, it’s a variety of distant clinical and administrative medical services using some type of technological media. The challenge lies in determining how to categorize telemedicine so as to better understand it and further its development.

I found two classification approaches, one based on human experiences of telemedicine, and another based on its underlying technologies. Let's start with telemedicine's technical categories.

In her 1996 article "Telemedicine Coming of Age"; Nancy Brown described telemedicine in terms of the technologies that support it. Brown's technical categories include:

Store and Forward – This is the asynchronous movement of electronic data between systems as the result of one health care provider requiring some type of action on that data by another health care provider, such as:

• A specialist’s staff requests a patient’s medical history from the primary care provider’s electronic system
• A hospital lab sends a digital image taken by a hospital lab technician to a specialist and the primary care provider
• A pharmacy receives an electronic prescription from a health care provider

Interactive Television (IATV) - IATV is better known today as video teleconferencing (VTC). Voice-over IP (VoIP) via the Internet provides a similar capability. Some clinical applications of this technology are:

• Interactive diagnostic and counseling care for patients who cannot travel because of physical limitations or distance
• Referrals and other medical assistance from doctors located remotely from the site where care is provided

Web & Wireless Communications - Brown noted that wireless technology and data sharing via the web were emerging as new methods of supporting telemedicine. This technology has since shown itself to be valuable in supporting interactive clinical care and real-time data sharing, for example:

• A patient's vital signs are sent to a physician's wireless device for immediate evaluation
• Traveling health care vehicles with satellites support the delivery of clinical care using VTC/VoIP and wireless diagnostic tools; send patients' "store and forward" data to their electronic medical file; and send their prescriptions to their pharmacies for mail delivery.

Next post: What is Telemedicine? (Part 2: The Human Definition)

References

American Telemedicine Association. (2010), Telemedicine Defined. [Online article]. Retrieved 10 April 2010.

Brown, Nancy. (1996), Telemedicine Coming of Age. [online article from the Telemedicine Information Exchange]. Retrieved 10 April 2010.

Wikipedia. (9 April 2010), Telemedicine. [Online article]. Retrieved 11 April 2010.