Telemedicine
Telemedicine is the use of technology to aid in the remote diagnosis and treatment of illness or injury. There are three main ways that telemedicine is used: storing data to be forwarded to a medical professional, remote monitoring in real time, or interactive services, where the medical professional can speak with and see the patient in real time, even though they may be separated by great geographic distance.
In the fist type, store-and-forward, doctors often use telemedicine to have a professional in a distant location analyze data or results. One example is that emergency rooms often transmit the results of x-rays taken at night to a radiologist in another country. Therefore, the radiologist may be working the day shift in his home country, but reading x-rays in the middle of the night in the US. This enables smaller hospitals that may have only one or two radiologists, to continue providing needed services 24 hours per day, seven days per week.
Remote monitoring is very widely used today, whether to monitor a patient in a hospital room 100 feet from the nurses station, or to monitor a patient at home from the hospital.
Interactive services are less common, but can be life-saving: in 2002, surgeons in Boston, Massachusetts were able to successfully assist in performing knee surgery on a meteorologist stranded in a research station in Antarctica. However, this emerging technology can be used to provide cutting-edge medical treatment to people in very remote parts of the world.