Telemedicine: Its Effects on Health Communication

This article analyzes telemedicine, the use of distant communication technologies within the context of clinical health care, and the effects it has on health communication. The main effect is that telemedicine has the capacity to substantially transform health care in both positive and negative ways and to radically modify personal face-to-face communication (Turner, 2003 Turner, J. W. 2003. “Telemedicine: Expanding healthcare into virtual environments”. In Handbook of health communication, Edited by: Thompson, T. L., Dorsey, A. M., Miller, K. I. and Parrott, R. 515–535. Mahwah, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates, Inc. Google Scholar). This has tremendous implications for health communication scholars in that they can extend the telemedicine debate by integrating fresh insights into more acceptable approaches that will refine and humanize mediated channels of health communication. There are several key areas of telemedicine that need to be discussed (i.e., e-health services, clinical encounters, etc.), all of which are identified in this article. In addition to describing the past and current applications of telemedicine, this article provides a better understanding of unique needs, resources, problems, and opportunities germane to telemedicine services.