For millennia, patients have had to accept whatever treatment a medical professional happened to foist upon them. Whether the medical professional happened to be a witch doctor in the Amazon or a scalpel-wielding Victorian physician eager to perform a frontal lobotomy, patients had little choice but to follow the doctor’s orders. Throughout history, there was very much an ‘us and them’ divide between doctors and patients. Doctors knew it all, patients knew nothing. This was very empowering for doctors, but disempowering for patients.

Telemedicine has leveled the playing field. Thanks to telemedicine, patients now have much more choice and involvement in their treatment. Telemedicine is empowering patients by giving them massively increased choice, and also opening up a world of potential learning and education that was previously closed off to them. Patients can now take charge of their own treatment and make choices for themselves with the help of doctors, medical professionals, and telemedicine apps.

Obviously, most patients are not fully qualified to make decisions about their medical treatment completely independently, but the fact that telemedicine has empowered patients by giving them far more choice, and far better sources of information than ever before, is surely a good thing.

Here are 6 ways in which telemedicine is empowering patients.

Telemedicine Gives Patients More Control Over Their Money

Telemedicine has many money-saving benefits. It allows patients to choose from a far larger pool of potential health care providers, enabling them to find the most cost-effective treatment. It also does away with the need to take a lot of time off work to travel to lengthy in-person consultations. The money that patients save by using telemedicine is hugely empowering. Having more money to pay off debt, increase savings, or buy goods and services that they desire or need is very empowering for patients.

Saving money (and time) is one of the biggest benefits of telemedicine.

Telemedicine Allows Patients More Choice of Who They Consult With

In days gone by, patients had to consult with whatever medical professional happened to be based nearest to their location. This often meant that patients had to make do with subpar doctors or facilities. It also meant that patients sometimes had to be treated by doctors they did not warm to. This lack of choice of who patients could deal with was very disempowering. Telemedicine has empowered patients by giving them a much better choice of which medical professionals they can be treated by.

Telemedicine Makes it Possible For Patients to Live in Remote Locations

Before telemedicine, many patients had no choice but to live in locations that were near to medical facilities, but otherwise unappealing. Many people had to live in big, overcrowded cities just to be near hospitals and medical facilities. Telemedicine has freed patients up big-time in this regard. Patients can now choose to live in much more remote locations far away from the nearest hospital or surgery. Having the ability to live in a peaceful wilderness or small, friendly village, while using telemedicine to meet their medical needs, is very empowering for patients.

Telemedicine Gives Patients More Choice Between Different Treatments

There are many ways to skin a cat. Exciting new medical treatments are being developed all the time that can meet the needs of patients much better than older, traditional treatments. Before the age of telemedicine, exciting new treatments were often unavailable to patients whose doctor was not up-to-date with the newest research. Telemedicine has empowered patients by enabling them to choose doctors in distant locations that offer groundbreaking new treatment options.

Want to travel the world, but still access health care? Enter telemedicine!

Telemedicine Gives Patients the Freedom to Travel the World

The ability to up sticks and travel the world is certainly very empowering. Telemedicine enables patients to do just that by giving them the option to consult with their physician or health care provider remotely, from anywhere in the world. Thanks to telemedicine, even people with chronic health conditions can explore the world safe in the knowledge that, should they need to, they can contact their doctor from any location. This is hugely empowering.

Telemedicine Gives Patients Their Time Back

Time is the most valuable resource there is. Traditional medicine often robs people of their precious time by requiring them to make long journeys to hospitals or surgeries and to wait for interminable hours in waiting rooms and ERs. Telemedicine empowers people by giving them far more control over their time. It allows patients to choose much less time-consuming methods of treatment, and therefore save plenty of hours with which they can do as they please.

In an age of rapid and monumental digital change, the health care sector has remained largely untouched. The internet changed the way so many industries do business, with Amazon challenging shops, Spotify and iTunes taking on physical CDs, and Netflix almost completely replacing digital television. These are unprecedented shifts in our 21st century landscape, and by all accounts, there’s plenty more to come. Yet, for a long time, health care remained the same; if you have a problem, you go and see your doctor, who assesses you and passes you onto a specialist if required. All that changed, and is set to continue to change, with the advent of telemedicine, a new arena of health care which benefits both patients and doctors.

Strangely, telemedicine is not a new concept, but instead comes from a practice introduced in the 1960s, which used telecommunications (i.e. telephones in those days) to connect remotely located patients with doctors. The same fundamental idea is still used for telemedicine in 2018, but of course, the available tools have opened up significantly. The word “telemedicine” now includes a number of different digital devices, including laptops, tablets, and the ultimate symbol of the digital age, the smartphone. Using these tools and an internet connection, patients now have access to their doctors anytime they want, as well as having access to many resources that were previously unavailable.

With telemedicine, you can contact your doctor immediately.

This is undoubtedly the single biggest way that telemedicine is disrupting the health care industry. Following on from many other industries that have introduced “on-demand” services, health care has made that leap in the form of telemedicine. Previously, a trip to the doctor was sometimes a day-long excursion that needed to be planned and prepared for a few days in advance. If your symptoms had cleared up by the time of your appointment, or even gotten worse, then you couldn’t accurately describe or show your doctor exactly what you were feeling or experiencing. With telemedicine, you can contact your doctor immediately, either when the symptoms flare up, or if you’re worried about them returning. No waiting around, no appointments; through this innovative new method of health care, you can engage a medical professional in a matter of moments, from the comfort of your home.

At its core, the U.S. health care system is largely inefficient. So much time is wasted, not only for patients, but for doctors too. Mountains of money are pumped into the system every year, by government and patients alike, but there’s no clear way of determining if all this cash impetus is being put to good use. Every year, more money seems to be applied in an effort to fix the problem, but there’s no clear-cut way of quantifying the results, if any. Telemedicine shifts the health care paradigm to one where the focus is on the patient; as a result, it becomes consumer-orientated, and much more effective because of it. By supplying health care to the country on patients’ terms, telemedicine apps and providers connect people with all sorts of health care professionals, any day of the week, day or night.

All in all, telemedicine looks to be the way of the future for health care.

Patients also now have a choice of specialists. Previously, they were stuck with the specialist recommended to them by their family doctor, which was often the one nearest to them physically. This could work out great if the specialist was well-regarded; but not so great if they weren’t. For people living in cities, this wasn’t the end of the world, as there was usually more than one specialist available to them. But for people living in remote areas, they would have no choice but to visit the only specialist available to them, regardless of their skill or reputation. Telemedicine opens up the field and lets people choose the specialist that suits them the best. Patients are no longer constrained by physical boundaries, and can engage with any specialist in the country, or even the world. Considering the host of conditions that require intimate knowledge, this is a major disruption for the health care industry, and completely changes the scope of the approach for patients and doctors alike.

There are also huge financial savings to be made via telemedicine, on both sides of the line. Patients can save money by not having to travel to visit a doctor and having reduced visitation costs, as doctors can fit more appointments into their working days. For physicians and hospital staff, administration costs go way down thanks to telemedicine, and they can also engage their patients in home analysis using the latest apps and digital aids, allowing them to get a clearer picture of the patient’s condition without having to closely monitor them personally. All in all, telemedicine looks to be the way of the future for health care, as digital dominates and transforms the landscape of many of our key industries. Patients and doctors can look forward to many more positive and beneficial disruptions!