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Literature Review of Telehealth/Telemedicine Jeff Pinnow UCSD Summer Research Program University of California, San Diego August 17, 2001 Faculty Mentor: Hans-Werner Braun San Diego Supercomputer Center  Worldwide, people living in rural and remote areas struggle to access timely, quality specialty medical care. Residents of these areas often have substandard access to specialty health care, primarily because specialist physicians are more likely to be located in areas of concentrated population. Because of innovations in computing and telecommunications technology, many elements of medical practice can be accomplished when the patient and health care provider are geographically separated. This separation could be as small as across town, across a state, or even across the world. Broadly defined, telemedicine is the transfer of electronic medical data (i.e. high resolution images, sounds, live video, and patient records) from one location to another. This transfer of medical data may utilize a variety of telecommunications technology, including, but not limited to: ordinary telephone lines, ISDN, fractional to full T-1’s, ATM, the Internet, intranets, and satellites. Telemedicine is utilized by health providers in a growing number of medical specialties, including, but not limited to: dermatology, oncology, radiology, surgery, cardiology, psychiatry and home health care. THE HISTORY OF TELEMEDICINE The idea that doctors might treat patients without being in the same room with them is not new. Likewise, doctor-to-doctor consultation does not require physical proximity. Stretching the definition of treatment, Dr. Sigmund Freuds letters to his patients might be examples of treatment at a distance. Since the dawn of the information age to the present, doctors have been giving patients and each other advice by telephone. At a more technically sophisticated level, the astronauts from the earliest Apollo missions in the 1960s have had their bodil