The demand for Health care services in America is growing much more rapidly than the supply of health care professionals available to deliver such care. In the face of this growing gap, telemedicine gives health care providers an innovative way to do more with less. As a result, telemedicine in all its varied incarnations is expanding rapidly, and as it does it is transforming the face of healthcare in both subtle and not so subtle ways.

In a 2015 report on the growth potential for telemedicine, the market intelligence firm Tractica predicted explosive growth in the number of consumers worldwide using home health technologies over the next few years. Such technologies, according to Tractica, allow health care providers to conduct virtual visits with patients, improve the level of care for the elderly, and remotely monitor the condition of patients with chronic health conditions.

Sharp Growth Projected

Tractica projects that those using these telemedicine services globally will jump from 14.3 million in 2014 to a total of 78.5 million by 2020. Factors helping to drive this rapid growth include the continuing upsurge in the cost of traditional health care delivery, a growing number of elderly patients in need of care, and an increase in the number of people living with chronic diseases.

In a recent overview of the potential offered by telemedicine, Jay Rajda, M.D., M.B.A., medical director at Aetna’s Innovation Labs, looked at specific areas of health care where he expects telemedicine to have its greatest impact.

Delivery of Urgent Care

Although telemedicine has already made some inroads into the area of urgent care, Dr. Rajda predicts that technological advances will vastly improve the delivery of urgent care through telemedicine. He points to the “ever-growing number of new telemedicine-enabling devices that allow providers to conduct physical exams remotely and consumers to share their clinical data from almost anywhere.”

As one specific example of such devices, he cites smart phones that can readily be converted into otoscopes, used to closely examine the ears. Yet another example, says Dr. Rajda, is the soon-to-be-available tricorder, a handheld device that can help health care professionals to examine your heart, lungs, and ears, and also collect vital health data, such as heart rate.

Primary Care

Thanks to the technologies available through telemedicine, routine visits to your primary physician can be conducted virtually, saving you and your doctor time and money. Dr. Rajda says that “making primary care easier and more convenient to access could lead to improved quality outcomes and reduce costs related to chronic conditions through better and timelier care.” And it’s already being tested in pilot projects, including one conducted by Aetna in Alaska. That program allows Aetna members to use secure videoconferencing technology to access care from their primary care physicians.

Aetna is not alone in its predictions that telemedicine will transform the delivery of primary care. In a recent article posted at HealthLeadersMedia.com, associate editor Lena Weiner points out that virtual visits to the doctor are no longer a rarity and indeed are becoming more commonplace. Interviewed by Weiner, Deborah Dahl, vice president of care innovation at Phoenix-based Banner Health, said, “I can’t imagine seeing a primary care provider in the office for a sinus infection anymore.” Dahl went on to say that she expects many health care services that have heretofore involved in-person visits to go online within the near future. Among the examples she cited are visits for routine acute care, follow-up care, and counseling.

Echoing Dahl’s predictions of a gradual move to virtual visits was Peter Rasmussen, M.D., medical director of distance health at the Cleveland Clinic. He told Weiner that he expects more urgent and follow-up care will move into “the virtual space” in the not too distant future. He said that Cleveland Clinic is laying the groundwork for a full virtual health care system, a significant expansion from its earlier use of telemedicine mostly for providing health care to rural areas.

Broader Access to Specialty Care

Even in the early days of telemedicine, most health care professionals recognized that one of this new technology’s most important capabilities was that it allowed remote medical clinics and small local hospitals to tap into the expertise of medical specialists at distant locations. A patient brought into a rural health clinic in severe pulmonary distress, for example, could benefit from telemedicine-enabled consultations with pulmonary specialists hundreds of miles away. Without this expert input, local doctors might be unsure how they should proceed in caring for the patient. As a result of the advice provided in this fashion, the patient’s eventual outcome almost certainly will be far better than would be the case without this input from specialists.

Aetna’s Dr. Rajda notes that telemedicine’s advanced telecommunications technologies make possible the creation of “an expanded virtual network for specialty providers and services for a wide range of specialties, including dermatology and behavioral therapy.” He points out that Aetna has developed a pilot program that allows users to readily access the expert opinions of specialists in dermatology. More such programs are almost certain to follow.

Care Management and Monitoring

Patients with chronic medical conditions or those recovering from surgical procedures account for a large number of traditional visits to the doctor’s office. These follow-up appointments are important because they allow health care providers to ensure that their patients are following doctor’s orders and/or recovering as they should from surgical procedures. However, the technologies available with telemedicine can closely monitor the vital signs of patients with chronic health conditions and transmit such data on a real-time basis to their doctors. These sophisticated monitoring devices can also flag results that are out of the ordinary so they get priority attention from the doctor.

In giving health care providers an opportunity to visit virtually with their patients in the patients’ homes, telemedicine gives health care providers the chance to intervene early and thus influence better outcomes, according to Dahl of Banner Health. Providers’ virtual visits to their patients’ homes give health care professionals an opportunity to look at patients’ home environment and identify possible hazards before an unfortunate accident occurs.

Useful for Medication Reviews

Dahl also notes that such virtual visits are invaluable in conducting reviews of the medications patients are taking. For example, a health care provider can request that a patient go into the household medicine cabinet so the doctor can spot any drugs that are past their expiration date or over-the-counter remedies that might conflict with other drugs being taken.

The use of remote monitoring devices has helped OSF Healthcare of Peoria, Illinois, to significantly improve the quality of the care given to patients in its system, according to registered nurse Suzanne Hinderliter, vice president of telemedicine services at OSF. OSF telemonitoring system consists of bedside monitoring devices that gather patient data and compare it with baseline data in the patient’s medical records. With this system, clinicians can readily spot subtle changes in a patient’s vitals that might otherwise go unnoticed. This improved patient monitoring system has played a key role in reducing OSF’s mortality rate by 26 percent and has also cut patients’ length of hospital stays by an average of 20 percent.

If you’d like to read additional articles about telemedicine and other topics of interest to health consumers, check out our blog.

Don Amerman is a freelance author who writes extensively about a wide array of nutrition and health-related topics.