ABSTRACT
Telemedicine captures the imagination. These technologies suggest possibilities that justify state and federal policies for both the telecommunications and health care arenas. This seemingly simple connection of technology to policy initiatives raises some very complex economic and public policy issues. In this chapter, the technologies and range of telemedicine are described. The chapter identifies the federal and state programs that promote telemedicine and explains the public policy questions that telemedicine raises. This chapter discusses the difficulties of answering directly with quantitative data the public policy questions concerning the cost effects of telemedicine. To illustrate this point, this chapter describes three examples of prototypical telemedicine projects and suggests that diffusion modeling can begin to address these complex public policy issues.
