Telemedicine

Introduction

According to the American Telemedicine Association, telemedicine has become a world leading innovative strategy for providing quality health care to patients via the exchange of medical services using communication technology (Siegal, 2012). This exchange of medical information has brought the accessibility to health care to many patient in which otherwise would not have the required resources to access many health care services. In many scenarios, telemedicine has bridged the gap between the need of specialized medical technology at one specific location and an individual’s medical diagnosis at another. Hospitals and other health care providers, which service rural areas of the country, now have an avenue of approach when dealing with accessibility of patients, especially the aging population in these areas. Telemedicine has provided the way of accessing technology and reaching out to a new strategy of practical medicine. In this research we will discuss many of the value added approaches of telemedicine and how it has affected the change in healthcare. There are three main areas of focus that will be considered. As stated, we will discuss and assess the technology currently being used to provide telemedicine services. This technology is broad and can cover vast amounts of information, but the focus will be to explain the main contributors of telemedicine technology and the adoption of this technology by providers. The first part of emphasis of application will include technology that is utilized by hospitals, clinics and physician offices and how this technology differs depending on the setting of the provider, for example, rural hospital and developing countries. The second part of technology emphasis and its application will be to review those institutes in which use telemedicine but are not considered health care providers,