I was researching information for this post and googled “telemedicine, applications of” and later tried “applications, telemedicine” and found some good sites which I will provide links to shortly. What I will present here is a summarised collection of the information I gathered. I will try to be brief as much as possible. Don’t want to write long posts and bore you all.
Telemedicine or telehealth has applications in just about every branch of medical practise. And these include:
- Radiology (Teleradiology)
- Pathology (Telepathology)
- Dermatology (Teledermatology)
- Psychiatry (Telepsychiatry)
- Primary Health Care
- Surgery (Telesurgery)
- Dentistry (Teledentistry)
- Cardiology
- Oncology
In fact, as you can begin to realise the list is endless! You can get a lot of information from the Centre for Measurement and Information in Medicine, City University, Uk.
However, I think some of the applications listed are not relevant for developing countries like Papua New Guinea. Since it maybe very costly (costs of telemedicine on a later post) to set up and maintain such services. Having said this, there are however, applications like telepathology, teleradiology and applications in primary health care which can be very useful.
Just to have a glimspe of how telepathology can be applied in a developing country, you can visit the Solomon Islands Telemedicine Network.
Now with a very broad view of what telemedicine is and its applications, my next post will be specifically about telemedicine applications in developing countries and provide some examples for illustration.
