Nearly half a century ago, telemedicine was disregarded for being an unwieldy, unreliable, and unaffordable technology. Rapidly evolving telecommunications and information technologies have provided a solid foundation for telemedicine as a feasible, dependable, and useful technology. Practitioners from a variety of medical specialties have claimed success in their telemedicine pursuits. Gradually, this new modality of healthcare delivery is finding its way into the mainstream medicine. As a multidisciplinary, dynamic, and continually evolving tool in medicine, researchers and users have developed various definitions for telemedicine. The meaning of telemedicine encapsulated in these definitions varies with the context in which the term was applied. An analysis of these definitions can play an important role in improving understanding about telemedicine. In this paper we present an extensive literature review that produced 104 peer-reviewed definitions of telemedicine. These definitions have been analyzed to highlight the context in which the term has been defined. The paper also suggests a definition of modern telemedicine. The authors suggest that telemedicine is a branch of e-health that uses communications networks for delivery of healthcare services and medical education from one geographical location to another. It is deployed to overcome issues like uneven distribution and shortage of infrastructural and human resources. We expect that this study will enhance the level of understanding and meaning of telemedicine among stakeholders, new entrants, and researchers, eventually enabling a better quality of life.

The telemedicine intervention in chronic disease management promises to involve patients in their own care, provides continuous monitoring by their healthcare providers, identifies early symptoms, and responds promptly to exacerbations in their illnesses. This review set out to establish the evidence from the available literature on the impact of telemedicine for the management of three chronic diseases: congestive heart failure, stroke, and chronic obstructive pulmonary disease. By design, the review focuses on a limited set of representative chronic diseases because of their current and increasing importance relative to their prevalence, associated morbidity, mortality, and cost. Furthermore, these three diseases are amenable to timely interventions and secondary prevention through telemonitoring. The preponderance of evidence from studies using rigorous research methods points to beneficial results from telemonitoring in its various manifestations, albeit with a few exceptions. Generally, the benefits include reductions in use of service: hospital admissions/readmissions, length of hospital stay, and emergency department visits typically declined. It is important that there often were reductions in mortality. Few studies reported neutral or mixed findings.

It is estimated that 10% of the world's population, approximately 650 million people, have some form of disability. Population growth, aging, and medical advances that preserve and prolong life have increased demands for health and rehabilitation services. Recent predictions indicate a shortage of speech-language pathologists and other rehabilitation specialists to provide care for individuals with disabilities. The application of telemedicine and telehealth technologies offers effective solutions to this challenge. An extensive literature review was conducted that included technical reports, websites, publications from the American Speech-Language-Hearing Association, and peer-reviewed journal articles of telehealth applications in speech-language pathology. Various applications of telehealth in speech-language pathology are described including types of technology, patient and clinician satisfaction, advantages of using telehealth, challenges and barriers to application, and future directions. This review provides a strong foundation for broader applications of telehealth technologies in this area of healthcare.

Telemedicine has significant potential to address many of the challenges facing primary care in today's healthcare environment. Challenges still remain in validating its impact on clinical outcomes with scientific rigor, as well as in standardizing methods to assess cost, but patient and provider acceptance is increasingly making telemedicine a viable and integral component of primary care around the world.

Advanced technology has limitations in the application of telehealth. Technological adversities were not reported as the cause of discontinuation of telehealth services by the practitioner or the individual. Audio and visual disturbances were primarily associated with videoconferencing. Supplemental asynchronous technology was widely reported as a solution to real-time instabilities.