Telemedicine: Beyond Remote Diagnosis

Telemedicine refers to the use of information technologies to support health care between participants who are separated from each other.1 It has potential to improve the accessibility, quality, and cost of healthcare, and may also contribute to medical education and research. Beyond applications for direct clinical diagnosis, telemedicine principles may be applied for remote management. In addition, these systems may provide infrastructure to add value to standard clinical ophthalmic diagnosis through mechanisms such as computerbased decision support from automated image analysis. We will discuss examples from one disease (retinopathy of prematurity [ROP]) that may be generalized broadly.