Reviewers
Authors
School of Medical Management and Information Sciences, Isfahan University of Medical Sciences, Isfahan, Iran
Abstract
One of the methods, especially those living in remote areas or have crashed and does not have
access to specialists is telemedicine. Telemedicine describes the use of medical information
exchanged from one site to another via electronic communications to improve patients’ health
status and care. Travel and wait times between the initial consultations with the patient’s own
general practitioner and referral to specialist can be reduced and specialists have successfully
provided remote triage and treatment consults of victims via the robot. The robot proved
to be a useful means to extend resources and provide expert consulting if specialists were
unable to physically be at the site. In fact, the telemedicine system is providing health care
services for individuals who are not available because of geographical and environmental
conditions. The aim of this study was to identify telemedicine applications in disaster, and
proposed use of this technology in areas where the shortage of specialists in remote areas
in disasters. This study was un-systematic (narrative) review. The literature was searched
for using of telemedicine in disaster and remote places with the help of libraries, conference
proceedings, data bank, and also search engines available at Google, Google scholar. In
our searches, we employed the following keywords and their combinations: telemedicine,
remote place, earthquake, disaster, war, and telecommunication in the searching areas of
title, keyword, abstract, and full text. In this study, more than 85 articles and reports were
collected and 26 of them were selected based on their relevancy. This literature review helps
define the concept of “components and usages of the Telemedicine in disaster” as the new
technology in the present age.
Keywords
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