ABSTRACT

Telemedicine is an umbrella term that includes the use of electronic communication devices and networking, software, and protocols by health care professionals as a cost-effective means of providing high-quality health care and communication between patients and professionals at disparate locations. More specifically, “telemedicine” is translated from the Latin medicus and the Greek tele, and is defined as “healing at a distance” (Strehle & Shabde, 2006, p. 956). Telemedicine may also be referred to as “e-health” (Karkalis & Koutsouris, 2006), based on the popularized nomenclature of adding e- to all things electronically enhanced, such as e-mail, e-learning, e-portfolio, and e-filing. As technological devices have advanced, such as smartphones and tablets, polymorphic platforms such as video chats, wikis, and blogs have increasingly made use of Web 2.0 technologies; telemedical practitioners’ creativity has also similarly evolved. Ease of use and increasingly affordable pricing have facilitated a near ubiquitous following within the general public and medical profession alike, and this ubiquity enables health care professionals to enhance patient care and health education in “diagnosis, consultation, treatment, and teaching” (Wurm, Hofmann-Wellenhof, Wurm, & Soyer, 2008, p. 106).