Telemedicine Essay

1. Introduction to Telemedicine

The use of information and communications technology (ICT) to deliver and support healthcare at a distance are known as telemedicine. Its function in link together two or more healthcare professionals and/or their patients, where they can exchange information for the purposes of diagnosis, education or treatment. This is important as a means for delivering healthcare services that has been recognised and known in recent policy statements which including the NHS's information strategy. However, its introduction needs careful management unlike other new developments (Briggs & Mccurry, 2001).

Telemedicine can also be defined as the use of medical information exchanged from one site to another through electronic

This is because products and services related to telemedicine are usually part of a larger investment by healthcare institutions which is either the delivery of clinical care or information technology. Even in the repayment fee structure, usually there is no different made between services provided on site and services provided through telemedicine. Telemedicine and telehealth are considered to be interchangeable terms, encompassing a wide definition of remote healthcare according to American Telemedicine Association (ATA) (American Telemedicine Association, 2014; Tobergte & Curtis, 2013). For examples, services can be provided are patient consultations via video conferencing, e-health including patient portals, transmission of still images, continuing medical education, remote monitoring of vital signs, nursing call centres, and consumer-focused wireless applications among other applications, are all considered as part of telemedicine and telehealth. In term of telehealth, it is used to refer to a broader definition of control healthcare that does not always involve clinical services. While, ATA uses the terms or definition in the same way one would refer to health or medicine in the common vernacular. In the term health information technology (HIT) telemedicine is closely allied. The different is HIT refers more to electronic medical records and related information systems while telemedicine refers