Telehealth and Medicine Today (THMT) reflects and communicates current medical perspectives, research, industry trends, and implementations. Read current open access content below, submit your opinions and work here. Keep your colleagues, students, and global digital health ecosystem appraised of developments and innovations. THMT editors invite breakthrough research and developments for better patient care, outcomes and system efficiencies.
The Impact of Telemedicine on
Health Disparities
Elizabeth White Baker, PhD
As healthcare delivery becomes more technology centered and less patient centered, with physicians physically distant from the patient, new dynamics may make biases more pronounced. Telemedicine requires the physician to provide care using decontextualized information. The psychological distance between the
physician and the patient and the patient being in a setting unfamiliar to the clinician means that the physician may offer poor care based on less-than-optimal information or potential misinformation.
The increased workload that telemedicine places on the provider with its technological demands can also worsen bias by overloading the physician to
the point that the overall quality of care might be compromised. With little cognitive capacity to actively combat bias, physicians fall back on heuristic short-cuts and might inadvertently exhibit even stronger bias.
This editorial outlines how telemedicine was thought to be
a fix for better patient outcomes by expanding access to care, and where the technological intervention fell short and how it could be addressed.
Physician bias exists in face-to-face setting and telemedicine, and must be effective across both delivery channels. Focusing more on the specific social and clinical skills needed to provide care via telemedicine is a critical need in the healthcare community.
Providers might see telemedicine as an issue of technical familiarity and skill.
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