- Telemedicine is the use of telecommunication technology delivering care by doctors from a distance in any form.
- Today we might typically think about using… it’s using smartphones, tablets, computers.
- However at it’s core, doctors have been doing telemedicine ever since the telephone was invented:
- initially through landline phones, there were some forms of telemedicine. Psychiatry would do therapy visits over the phone.
- then through video recordings. Neurologists, then did might do video recordings, and they would hand pass it along, and they would be able to share videos of movement disorders, reflexes.
- then digital cameras by the late nineties, Suddenly, you could take photos that you could upload and share with people, but it didn’t really catch on. It stalled out a lot because ultimately you still needed a hard wire connection to the computer (vs wireless) and the internet was slow had the slow internet connections.
- then, in the last decade or two, smartphones and tablets arrived. These devices use wifi and are able to share ridiculously fast speeds and amazing connectivity all over the world, with combination of security and cloud based computing: it really has changed the game.
Jules Lipoff, MD. Education for Teledermatology and AI in Dermatology. 8th World Congress of Teledermatology, Skin Imaging and AI in Skin diseases – November 2020
