The history of telemedicine is longer than you would think, with first telehealth visits were conducted over the telephone, in which the doctor interviewed the remote patient and asked specific questions to determine the cause of the problem, foregoing the physical exam and then issuing a diagnosis over the phone.

The first recorded instance of telehealth involved the creator of the telephone, Alexander Graham Bell, the inventor of the telephone, who used it to summon assistance for a lab assistant who had suffered an acid burn. The use of radio communication and telephone communication by doctors to communicate remotely with patients in remote areas became common in the 1930s. It wasn’t until NASA began sending astronauts into space for extended missions that doctors developed remote heart and respiratory monitoring devices and information was then transmitted back down to Earth via radio signal.

As far back as 1964, the Nebraska Psychiatric Institute began using two-way television links to communicate with the Norfolk State Hospital, which was 112 miles away, for educational and consultation purposes. By 1989, interactive telehealth was seeing use in specialized settings. Telehealth became more commonplace in routine medical practices in the late 1990s thanks to the widespread use of the Internet. Even though minor complaints were easier to diagnose, the number of illnesses that doctors can diagnose without an examination or lab work is limited.

With the continued advancement of medical technology, the expansion in the number of conditions that are treatable via remote visit also expanded. This was especially true with the advent of mobile technology that allowed for better communication between doctors and patients, ranging from email communication, monitoring of conditions via specialized equipment connected to a smartphone, and video chat visits, among other methods of communication. As a result, doctors could send prescriptions to the pharmacy and patients could request refills via smartphone apps and online communication rather than dealing with the doctor’s office staff directly. People who didn’t want to take the risk of contracting illness by visiting a medical facility used video chat and medical mobile application technology to manage their conditions and communicate with their providers remotely after the COVID-19 pandemic started.

Even though telehealth is on the rise, outdated laws governing patient privacy and practices, which fail to take modern mobile technology advancements, such as security, into account, have kept the practice from taking off to the extent that it could have in the last decade, with over 50% increases in insurance claims for telehealth in 2015 and 2016 alone, demonstrating the demand for increased access to telehealth. For patient privacy, laws are being written to allow the use of applications like FaceTime and Zoom, but most laws require connections to take place through a more secure service, some of which have been developed specifically for telehealth.

Approximately 75% of American healthcare facilities have made efforts to include telehealth in their service offerings in response to growing patient demand for telehealth and mobile connectivity. Especially in the fields of highly specialized medicine like teleneurology, the future of telehealth will undoubtedly include a wider range of conditions that are treatable by the practice as technology advances, so we should now turn our attention to the various ways in which it is already in use.