Recent Reports on Telemedicine

Perhaps, just as I had hoped in April, telemedicine really is helping to improve the state of health care.

A recent study "assessed whether telemedicine (real-time, two-way audio and video, and digital imaging and communications in medicine [DICOM] interpretation) or telephone was superior for decision making in acute telemedicine consultations". The results sound pretty positive (emphasis added by me):

The authors of this trial report that stroke telemedicine consultations result in more accurate decision making compared with telephone consultations and can serve as a model for the effectiveness of telemedicine in other medical specialties. The more appropriate decisions, high rates of thrombolysis use, improved data collection, low rate of intracerebral haemorrhage, low technical complications, and favourable time requirements all support the efficacy of telemedicine for making treatment decisions, and might enable more practitioners to use this medium in daily stroke care.

Check out Video: Emergency Room Stroke Exam with a Webcam from Wired for more.