Telemedicine is an advancing development from the expanding field of health information technology (HIT). The U.S. Department of Health and Human Services defines HIT as the interchanging of health information by electronic means (http://www.hhs.gov/ocr/privacy/hipaa/understanding/special/healthit/, "Health Information Technology"). Telemedicine is similar to HIT except it relates more to the delivery of health services by electronic remote means. The benefits that both can bring to our health care system are enormous. Including: improved patient care, cost reductions, less errors, better communication, added accessibility to patients, and farther efficient and effective methods of managing and delivering health care. Both HIT and telemedicine carry the potential power to dramatically improve our health care system.
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Created by Dr. Pat Basu, the website provides patients with an inexpensive, alternate way to receive health care. With a flat rate of $40 per exam, the website is cheaper than a $1000 emergency room visit or a $300 urgent care trip as noted by PBS (Sreenivasan, 2015). In an interview between Dr. Pat Basu and PBS Newshour’s Hari Sreenivasan, Dr. Basu states that an estimated 1.3 billion cases in the United States annually consist of people walking in to see a doctor. He further explains that an estimated 300-400 million of those cases could have been taken care of through his website. When utilizing the previous stated estimates, and the cost differentials between an exam on docotorsondemand.com verses an emergency room visit or a trip to urgent care, the potential health care savings that his website can save the United States comes out to $25 billion (Sreenivasan,
Created by Dr. Pat Basu, the website provides patients with an inexpensive, alternate way to receive health care. With a flat rate of $40 per exam, the website is cheaper than a $1000 emergency room visit or a $300 urgent care trip as noted by PBS (Sreenivasan, 2015). In an interview between Dr. Pat Basu and PBS Newshour’s Hari Sreenivasan, Dr. Basu states that an estimated 1.3 billion cases in the United States annually consist of people walking in to see a doctor. He further explains that an estimated 300-400 million of those cases could have been taken care of through his website. When utilizing the previous stated estimates, and the cost differentials between an exam on docotorsondemand.com verses an emergency room visit or a trip to urgent care, the potential health care savings that his website can save the United States comes out to $25 billion (Sreenivasan,