Most patients and providers are now familiar with telemedicine systems. The healthcare facility lockdowns during the coronavirus pandemic meant routine appointments in doctors' clinics around the world transitioned rapidly to telemedicine consultations. Patients now use smartphone, tablet and web applications to videoconference with their doctors instead of attending in person. Many doctors and hospitals have adopted general-purpose tools such as Zoom or Microsoft Teams, but there are also a wide range of commercial systems that integrate appointment booking, note-taking and access to clinical data with the video call itself.
A long history
The first recorded use of telemedicine goes back to the clinic of Willem Einthoven in the early 20th century. As the inventor of the original electrocardiogram (ECG) - the method of measuring the health of the heart by monitoring its electrical activity - Einthoven needed a way to transmit ECGs from the hospital to his research centre. His use of telephone wires for this purpose is perhaps the first use of telemedicine.
The first use of television to provide healthcare is reported to be by Massachusetts General Hospital, which in 1968 provided medical care to over 1,000 patients at the Logan International Airport Medical Station. Although the use of television for clinical services waned over the years, doctors regularly used telephones to communicate with patients, and that stopped being differentiated from normal medical practice.
Only in the 1990s, when the personal computer began widespread adoption, did the term "telemedicine" come back into use. Providing routine consultations via personal computers and the internet was long limited by reimbursement policies and patchy access to technology, but teleradiology, telepathology and teledermatology - where images are transferred via the internet for interpretation by clinicians in a remote location - grew steadily.
The COVID acceleration
With the onset of the coronavirus pandemic, telemedicine use increased dramatically. In addition to the imaging-focused specialties that had used remote review for decades, family doctors and clinicians of all specialties began routinely using videoconferencing to examine patients and provide video-based consultations where face-to-face sessions were not possible.
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