Teledentistry: Bringing Dental Care Closer to Every Home

Teledentistry represents a transformative integration of telecommunication technologies into dental practice, enabling the remote exchange of clinical data, high-resolution images, patient histories, and expert consultations for diagnosis, treatment planning, and longitudinal care management. This modality significantly enhances accessibility to oral health services, particularly in geographically isolated or underserved populations, while optimizing operational efficiency, reducing healthcare expenditures, and minimizing patient travel burdens. It effectively mitigates urban-rural disparities, facilitates interdisciplinary collaboration, and supports continuous professional education. This expanded review delves deeply into teledentistry's historical evolution, multifaceted operational frameworks, underlying technical infrastructures, diverse clinical applications across dental specialties, robust evidentiary base from global studies, and critical ethical, legal, regulatory, and economic dimensions. Furthermore, it incorporates contemporary advancements—such as artificial intelligence (AI)-augmented diagnostics, 5G-enabled real-time interactions, and blockchain-secured data transmission—and prognosticates future trajectories, including integration with robotic systems and wearable sensors, to underscore its pivotal role in reshaping equitable, sustainable oral healthcare delivery in the digital era.