Telemedicine in Remote Areas: Possibility of Establishing a Telemedicine System

Abstract

The COVID-19 epidemic is a severe test for the whole medical industry. Under such a circumstance, healthcare is seeking creative business models. Contemporarily, many countries have developed telemedicine, which is an innovative way of consultation brought by digitalization to healthcare. It has developed more rapidly under the spread of COVID-19. Popularizing telemedicine is a perfect method to deal with the epidemic, which can be specified with telediagnosis, teletherapy, and telemonitoring. Since patients in remote districts also long for professional medical services, this paper intends to explore the possibility of building a medical institution to provide telemedicine for patients living in remote areas. Besides, this paper discusses the application of each function and its limitations. Though telemedicine brings more chances for the patients who have a distance to the medical institution, high quality equipment and funds are needed to support the run of telemedicine. However, the implementation of 5G can improve the performance of telemedicine, especially in the latency of telesurgery. Overall, though building a medical station that supports telemedicine is challenging, there are particular populations have demand on it. These results shed light on guiding further exploration of digital updating for medical industry.