Telemedicine is becoming an increasingly popular method of providing affordable and accessible health care to individuals who either don’t have affordable health insurance coverage or live in rural communities. While it might feel like telemedicine is still in development or too new to provide you with private ads secure care, it’s been around for much longer than you might think. At MyTeleBenefits, we want to provide you with a brief history of where telemedicine originated so you can see how it’s evolved into what we have today.

Early days

Believe it or not, telemedicine isn’t all that new. It’s been around since the late 1950s when the Nebraska Psychiatric Institute and Norfolk State Hospital used a closed-circuit TV for psychiatric consultations. This allowed providers to perform these consults with patients from a remote location without having to go back and forth between locations.

Since this time, hospitals have continued to develop new methods of implementing telemedicine techniques to evaluate stroke and intensive care.

Progression

As the benefits of telemedicine have become more evident over the years, many hospitals and medical providers have made great efforts to apply the principles of remote care to radiology, pathology, and pharmacy.

Teleradiology

Teleradiology has been practiced for nearly 60 years as radiologists used to digitize medical images to share with doctors in other areas. Now, they use direct digital capture technology that provides them with a primary image on the computer. This can be easily shared with other providers in an effort to provide coordinated care and collaborate to diagnose and treat patients.

Telepathology

Similar to radiology, the field of pathology has started digitizing pathology slides to more easily share information for collaboration. While there were formerly concerns about sharing sensitive slides across servers, advancements in cybersecurity have since quelled these roadblocks by ensuring the safe transmission of information.

Telepharmacy

With the advent of mail-order pharmacies, digital prescriptions, and video chat, telepharmacy has been a seamless part of our everyday lives in health care. Pharmacists can easily dispense medications while providing a patient consultation without ever seeing a patient in person or leaving the pharmacy.

Legislation

The Affordable Care Act, which was put into effect in 2010, was designed to make health care affordable for more US citizens. Part of this was encouraging the use of telehealth strategies to reach more rural patients and those who aren’t able to leave their homes. This has brought the practice of telemedicine more into the mainstream and has made it easier for people in these groups to get the care they need.

Telemedicine today

Telemedicine today has gotten to be a part of the social norm as many clinics and insurance companies offer it as an efficient and affordable way to meet with a doctor at any time. Non-emergency medicine can be more easily practiced after hours as an on-call medical provider can easily jump on a video chat with a patient to provide medical advice, diagnose conditions, and send prescriptions to a pharmacy. Many patients have found that this is a convenient way to get medical attention for non-emergency ailments.

Sign up today

Get the medical care that you need with MyTeleBenefits. We provide telemedicine to patients who live in an underserved area, find it difficult to get to a clinic for an appointment, or simply want the convenience of personal and pet medical care via a phone call or video chat. Sign up for a membership today to get the attention that you need. If you’d like to learn more about our team and our services, please don’t hesitate to give us a call at 877-376-7472. We offer medical care to you, your family, and your pet 24 hours a day, 365 days a year.