Telemedicine, Telehealth, Connected Health, and Digital Health Defined

See on Scoop.it - iMaritha

When it comes to using technology to deliver healthcare effectively, we are in a state of widespread confusion. And this confusion is contributing to the lack of progress on the healthcare innovation front, especially on the legislative and fiscal side. For example, as one analysis revealed, no two states in the union share the same definition or regulation for telehealth.

One of the definitions of confusion is “a disorderly combination of elements with identities lost and distinctions blended”. I love that description as it paints an apt picture of the conundrum posed by the variety of terms, differing definitions, and inconsistent use of terms. How can we regulate or even simply offer any Digital Health service, if parties are not even on the same page regarding their understanding of the terms?

A Telehealth Taxonomy

When I launched Ingenium Telehealth in 2012, I wanted to make sure that I would be using the terms in this field “correctly”, naively believing that surely the industry had agreed on a set of definitions. So I downloaded and searched about two dozen research articles on the definition of Telehealth and Telemedicine (including two or three articles comparing definitions in the research literature) and frustratedly came up empty handed. There didn’t seem to be any consensus! So, by analyzing and merging the definitions that appealed to my logical engineering mind, I settled on a my own set of definitions and created a visual to better communicate my view of the telehealth world.

The definition I use for Telehealth is "delivering healthcare at a distance", which includes distant health education (TeleEducation), remote treatment (TeleTherapy) and Telemedicine.

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