Using Telemedicine to Improve Outcomes in Diabetes—An Emerging Technology

The definition of telemedicine is the use of telecommunications to support health care. Telemedicine includes timely transmission and remote interpretation of patient data for follow-up and preventative interventions. The main purpose of this approach is to facilitate a productive interaction between the patient and the health care provider in order to achieve improved treatment results and lower treatment costs. To understand the current and potential future advantages and disadvantages of implementing telemedical care, it is helpful to consider the answers to the following seven questions: (1) what is telemedicine, (2) how is telemedicine applied to diabetes, (3) what are the goals for using telemedicine, (4) what are the benefits of using telemedicine, (5) are the goals of telemedicine achieved for diabetes, (6) what are barriers to adoption of telemedicine, and (7) what are promising research opportunities in diabetes telemedicine?