Telemedicine Research from Big Bang to 2022

Abstract

The Clinical Information Systems (CIS) section of the IMIA Yearbook of Medical Informatics systematically screens about 2,500 publications from more than 1,000 journals annually to find the best CIS publications. The editors of the CIS section have noticed a trend toward patient-centered care supported by AI and machine learning and increased research in cross-institutional data sharing, particularly in telemedicine. As a result, they adjusted their search query to include the MeSH term “telemedicine.” As a preliminary step and to get a sense of the historical development of telemedicine research activity, they performed a bibliometric analysis of all previously published papers in PubMed indexed with the tag “Telemedicine” as MeSH Major Topic. They retrieved 29,289 publications from 1976 to 2022 and used their titles and abstracts to create a bibliometric network that visualizes the most relevant terms, their frequency and relationship to each other, and the chronological sequence of their publication. The development over time also shows a clear move toward patient-centeredness. Interestingly, the term “Covid,” which has only recently come into use, takes on a central role in the network.

Transforming Clinical Information Systems: Empowering Healthcare through Telemedicine, Data Science, and Artificial Intelligence Applications

“…The process of searching for relevant publications and selecting the best papers in the CIS section follows a well-defined systematic approach. After using the same query for eight years, we decided this year, following an extensive analysis [8], to incorporate the topic of telemedicine in our queries and remove search terms related to geographic information systems. In mid-January 2023, we conducted the queries.…”

“…To rectify this, we conducted a thorough investigation by searching PubMed using the MeSH Major Topic "telemedicine," resulting in nearly 30,000 publications. These publications were subjected to bibliometric analysis [8]. Based on our findings, we decided to include terms related to telemedicine, such as "Telemedicine [MeSH Major Topic]", "Telemedicine majr/OT", "Telehealth [OT]" and "Telemonitoring [OT]" in our PubMed query.…”