Telemedicine was created as a way to treat patients who were located in remote places, far away from local health facilities or in areas of with shortages of medical professionals.
This desire for more convenient care, combined with the unavailability of many overburdened medical professionals have led to the creation of telemedicine apps.
There are 3 common types of telemedicine:
Interactive Medicine – which allows patients and physicians to communicate in real-time while maintaining HIPAA compliance, usually done through an app that allows for video chat.
Store and Forward – which permits providers to share patient information with a practitioner in another location.
Remote Patient Monitoring – which allows remote caregivers to monitor patients that reside at home by using mobile medical devices to collect data (e.g. blood sugar or blood pressure)