TEXTO II
You mean I don’t have to show up? The promise of telemedicine
“Aside from whatever a visit to the doctor costs you ∈ money, it also costs you ∈ time. A lot of it!
End to end, the travel and waiting time for a doctor’s appointment can take several hours — often disrupting work or school. Only 17 percent of it — 20 minutes, on average — is spent actually seeing the doctor, according to a study by the University of Pittsburgh, physician Kristin Ray and colleagues at the Harvard Medical School and the RAND Corporation.
In a year, Americans spend 2.4 billion hours making doctor visits. Valued at average wage rates, that’s worth more than 52billion—equivalenttothetotalworkingtimeandincomeof1.2millionpeople.Onaverage,wepay32 when visiting a doctor. But separately, the value of our time adds up to more, $43, according to Dr. Ray’s study.
For certain kinds of health care, there is a better way. Long after electronic communication and technology have revolutionized other services (like preparing taxes, booking travel and banking), emails, phone calls, video chats and other telemedicine applications are gradually supplementing or replacing some types of office visits.
Telemedicine holds the promise of giving some of our time back. And it may have other advantages. Care delivered ∈ this way requires no travel, and if one waits at all it’s at home or work, not at a doctor’s office. In an era of FaceTime and Skype, patients are starting to expect more convenient access to doctors. The vast majority of patients report that they want to be able to communicate with their doctors by email. Perhaps for this reason, the market for telemedicine is growing rapidly.
In a passionate commentary on the establishment’s hesitancy to embrace telemedicine, David Asch, a University of Pennsylvania physician, pointed out that the inconvenience of face-to-face care limits its use, but arbitrarily and invisibly. The costs of waiting and travel time and those borne by rural populations with poor access to in-person care don’t appear on the books. “The innovation that telemedicine promises is not just doing the same thing remotely,” Dr. Asch wrote, “but awakening us to the many things that we thought required face-to-face contact but actually do not. ”
(Adapted from: http://www.nytimes.com/2016/05/17/upshot/you-mean-i-dont-have-to-show-up-the-promise-of-telemedicine.html?ref=policy)
According to the text, the telemedicine brings the idea of:
