Telemedicine and neurosciences

It is well documented that there is an acute shortage of neurologists and neurosurgeons in India and globally. Despite all efforts, it will be impossible to make available neurospecialists in all suburban and rural areas. Simultaneously, there has been an exponential increase in the growth and development of Information and Communication Technology (ICT). Plummeting costs and unbelievable sophistication in the availability of user-friendly mobile video conferencing devices is making distance meaningless. Geography has become History! Worldwide, the ultraconservative health care industry, in particular, the medical community, has been uniformly slow to adopt and embrace the use of ICT to extend their clinical reach. In the last decade, however, specialists in all branches of neurosciences are slowly accepting the inevitable that telemedicine must and will have to be incorporated into the core of the healthcare delivery system. This literature review summarizes the current use of telemedicine in different subspecialties of neurosciences. The author defines the growth and development of clinical telemedicine in India with special reference to Neurosciences and attempts to show the stellar role telemedicine has to play in enhancing the services provided by doctors. As clinicians regularly using technology, it should not be difficult for us to convince our patients that today a virtual remote consult and management can indeed effectively substitute for a physical face-to-face encounter.