Telemedicine: hopes, reality and the impact on telecommunications

摘要

Telemedicine (the interaction of telecommunications, computing and medicine) could have significant impact on health care. Whilst hopes are high that telemedicine can make a major contribution to the provision of unviersal healthcare (and reduce the cost of that provision), these hopes are tempered by a reality that large scale deployment faces many issues outside the bounds of the technologies. However successful application of telemedicine will have a dependence on the provision of approapriate telecommunication services.