Telemedicine is the use of technology and telecommunication services to monitor and educate the patients about their health remotely and prescribe the related diagnosis.
Most of the consultation is conducted through video conferencing tools compliant with HIPAA (Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act), which was passed in 1996.
Mee'bay ibn
The global telemedicine market was around $ 40 billion in 2019 and is expected to rise further owing to: increase in trend of using technology for health purposes, low-cost treatment, reach of efficient health facilities to rural areas, reduce the waiting time of hospitals, decent governments initiatives around the world, rapid development in technology, growth in the telecommunication sector, and increase in chronic diseases patients.
The global telemedicine market is expected to rise with a quite high growth rate in 2020, despite COVID-19. The market is expected to increase by approximately 10% in 2020, to reach the market value of $ 44 billion. The high growth rate is due to the extensive use of telemedicine in the pandemic.
Teladoc announced that in March 2020 it received around 15,000 requests of virtual visits in a single day, which shows the rapid increase in trend of telemedicine during the pandemic.
Some of the top players in telemedicine include Reach Health, Apollo Hospitals, Cloudvisit Telemedicine, Cerner Corporation, OBS Medical, Cisco, Siemens, and Microsoft.
Abu Afad
Some of the important applications of telemedicine include low-cost treatment of diabetes, sleep apnea, and hypertension, getting rehab at home, and providing of children mental health consultations.
Most people confuse telemedicine with telehealth, but both terms are used for different purposes. Telehealth is mostly used in a broader sense which covers both telemedicine and telecare, used by patients to monitor their health and safety inside their own homes such as health monitoring devices, and alert systems in case of emergency. Telemedicine is a narrower term which includes remote monitoring and consultation.