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The Future of Telemedicine

Telemedicine is the future and it's changing faster than ever before. The exponential growth of technology over the past years has led to the affordability and accessibility of telemedicine. The increased popularity of telemedicine provides access to medical care and hospitals 24 hours a day, 7 days a week.

Smartphones are becoming more popular by the year and a wide variety of mobile applications have been developed with telemedicine in mind. There have been devices designed to monitor blood pressure and glucose with telemedicine and telehealth software in mind.

About every medical service has established guidelines that need to be followed and this includes the telemedicine industry. Telemedicine providers and users don't yet have a set of standard guidelines but they do follow the same guidelines set by the American Medical Association.

Some of the guidelines involve when to use telemedicine, which states that telemedicine can't be used for any condition requiring an in-person examination by a physician. Notifying the patient is also necessary for telemedicine providers, they have to explain how these services work and the limits of telemedicine technology. Visit link for more info.

There are also guidelines under the American Medical Association that reference patient evaluation, management, and finding suitable physicians. They state you are responsible for determining the requirements of the patient. It tells you how to connect a patient with a suitable physician. Outlines are also available for recording and storing patient data.

There are guidelines for billing information which states that telemedicine providers need to keep their patients informed of medical costs before any procedure, treatment or exam takes place.

There are a number of barriers to telemedicine even though it has been increasing in popularity. Some of these barriers include state legislation, state licensing, and patient reimbursement policies.

The future of telemedicine looks great as of now. The telemedicine industry will be a 36 billion dollar industry by 2020 according to market research. There was a large group of patients who were surveyed recently and 75% report they would be interested in telemedicine and predict a bright future for the industry.

With many advancements in the fields of technology such as virtual reality and a constantly growing user base of telemedicine services show an exciting future for the industry. There are always advancements being made, some of which include robotic arms which can be controlled remotely by a specialised physician. Then there's the whole smart watch industry which connect to health trackers using bluetooth or wireless networks. All of these things will play an important role in the telemedicine industry in the future.

Keep an eye out for telemedicine in the future. The telemedicine industry is growing rapidly and should not be overlooked.

  

To read more about this, go to http://www.huffingtonpost.com/topic/telehealth.

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