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Specialties that use telemedicine


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What are the specialties that are heavily using telemedicine? The first specialties that come to mind are those that require little physical interaction, psychiatry and radiology and maybe palliative care?

Any ideas?

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I've seen it most heavily in some sub-specialties of pediatrics, in all honesty. These are fields with broad catchment areas which require regular check-ups, but are usually fairly simple and healthy otherwise. Physicals in these cases, mostly consisting of basic vitals, are done by local RNs.

I've also seen some interesting uses in pathology, mostly with frozen sections, using on-site pathology techs to prepare the slides, then sub-specialist pathologies to read them.

These days telemedicine usage seems to be driven locally by clinicians who want to use it. Uptake varies wildly site-to-site and practitioner-to-practitioner. So it's not always the specialties with the best fit for telemedicine using it, but rather the individuals or groups with the most enthusiasm for trying it out who are making it work on a regular basis.

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18 minutes ago, 1997 said:

What are the specialties that are heavily using telemedicine? The first specialties that come to mind are those that require little physical interaction, psychiatry and radiology and maybe palliative care?

Any ideas?

certainly is used in radiology - but often less than you think (there still is a large part of practice in radiology that requires on site interactions both with patients and with technologists). 

Ha, it would be nice if we were left alone sometimes :) 

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My rheumatologist uses tele-medicine to communicate and check up on patients who he has already done a physical exam on and are pretty stable. He's even offered to continue to be my rheumatologist even after I move out of the area for med school in January (I'm at a UBC distributed site). 

Rheumatology is definitely a discipline I would not have expected to incorporate tele-medicine so I think it just illustrates how much the use of technology in medicine depends on the individual initiatives of each practitioner. 

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