Telemedicine: challenges and opportunities

Telemedicine is many things to many people. Only until a few years ago, telemedicine was equated to video teleconferencing between physicians, while nowadays, perhaps the most active area in telemedicine is the store‐and‐forward model. There is a big shift from private and dedicated modes of communications to connectivity through the Internet. Presented is a collection of applications that provide snapshots of this diversity. The key technical challenges identified from these experiences are connectivity and integration. Also, at issue are the evolution process through which a telemedicine application evolves and the ability to choose the right set of technology for the diverse type of telemedicine applications. With the projected improvements in speed and quality of the Internet, wireless communication, and personal computational devices, it is expected that various concepts of telemedicine will develop into standard practices in tomorrow’s health care.