Telemedicine Consultations

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Telemedicine is the use of medical information exchanged from one site to another by using electronic communications to improve a patient’s clinical health status. This allows providers to be able to care for patients or give advice to other medical providers in a particular medical subspecialty or healthcare specialization where the recipient of that service is located at a different geographic location from that of the provider. Typically, such services originate from health care systems, hospitals or large medical group practices that employ a diverse collection of expert and highly experienced medical and healthcare specialists. The specialists communicate with patients and/or providers at physically separate locations using a variety of …show more content…

The specialist is often located either in a special telemedicine facility or in his or her office. The patient is at a different location, such as a clinic, nursing home or hospital, and may be accompanied by a telemedicine presenter, who is a staff member at that location. Communication is facilitated typically by using secure digital videoconferencing where the specialist’s image is captured by a video camera, digitized and transmitted over secure, broadband speed telecommunications lines to where the patient is located and where it appears on a video screen to be viewed by the patient. At the same time, the patient’s image is captured by a similar process and transmitted to a video screen for viewing by the specialist. The conversation between the patient and the specialist is captured and transmitted in the same way. The transmission speeds are sufficiently fast that the specialist and the patient can conduct conversations as if they were in the same room and hence the use of the descriptor “live, interactive” for these types of …show more content…

It derives its name from the fact that information is captured and “stored” in a digital file at one location and then transmitted or “forwarded” to another location for evaluation. Dermatology provides a good example of this type of consultation. In a dermatology store-and-forward consultation, a provider at a remote site typically takes digital pictures of the patient’s skin lesion with a digital camera and then uploads those images to a secure server along with other clinical information about the patient. At a later time, the dermatologist signs into that server, views the images and reviews the clinical information and writes a set of recommendations that are stored on the server. The referring physician or the original provider at his or her convenience can then sign into the server, review the recommendations and inform the patient of the results and any recommended treatments. Teleradiology is the most widely recognized and used type of store-and-forward consultation. As the longest-standing application of this type and to date the only one that is fully reimbursable, it has evolved into its own area of application and does not fall within the scope of this

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