Telemedicine may be the most rapidly evolving area in healthcare, but the innovation has exceeded some providers' capacity to understand its implications, according to an article on The Washington Post website.
But as telemedicine begins to affects nearly every field of medicine, is its increasingly complex application is being matched with appropriate training.
“Today, telemedicine usually means a video chat,” Eric Topol, digital health expert and executive vice president of the Scripps Research Institute in La Jolla, Calif., said in the article.
“But soon, telemedicine will be a data-exchange platform, in which patients are generating and transmitting data — vital signs, genetic scores, microbiome information — in real time to doctors. Are we preparing physicians for that kind of future?”