Telemedicine Services

Telemedicine is medical information that is transferred via an interactive audio/visual means for the purpose of consulting, information exchange, and at times for remote examinations or supervision of an actual procedure. Telemedicine services, therefore, is a term that covers a very wide range of different remote communications regarding healthcare.

For example, two doctors discussing a health issue over the phone could technically be classified as telemedicine, as could several doctors having a meeting about a case over video conferencing software in real time.

Telemedicine is not a new idea. In fact, it has been used effectively over the course of history as a way to communicate certain things over distance. For example, in African villages, smoke signals used to be used to warn people to stay away from a village if the people were struck with illness.

In Australia during the early part of the 1900s, there were people who used two way radios to communicate with the Royal Flying Doctor Service of Australia. Often these radios were powered by dynamos that were pedal-driven, like a bicycle.

These are very primitive forms of telemedicine, but they help to paint a clearer picture of what Telemedicine really is. Telemedicine is the application of actual clinical medicine over distance through means of information exchange.

If the doctor and patient cannot be together, then the doctor uses some means of communication to tell the patient what to do. Or, if two doctors cannot be together to discuss a case, they can discuss the case via some means of communication. This is what Telemedicine is.

Telemedicine services, which are closely related to telehealth services, are especially useful in regions or demographics where the communities and the populace are isolated. In these types of situations, people might not be able to just drive to the hospital like people who live in major cities.

For this reason, it is very beneficial to have telemedicine services in place. It has actually accomplished a lot of good, and it is even used in more populated areas where hospitals are in existence. In essence, it is being applied to all domains......not just the more isolated and remote ones.

For example, one of the first modern telemedicine systems was one that operated over standard phone lines. It was meant to help diagnose and treat patients who required defibrillation and cardiac resuscitation.

These telemedicine services were developed by a company called MedPhone in 1989. The Internet, and especially the advent of high speed internet and better computers, has helped to make even advanced fields like teleradiology easier over distances.