Risk and Opportunity of Telemedicine in Healthcare Management

As we move past COVID19, telephone medicine and telemedicine is becoming integral to patient’s clinical care for both primary and specialty care. In this paper, after a brief bibliometric visualization of telemedicine literature in trade journals, we discuss the difference between telemedicine, telehealth, telephone medicine, and direct-to-consumer telemedicine. Then we state the difficulties that differentiate an office visit from telephone medicine appointment. We also identify three root causes of medical errors in telehealth that leads to malpractice lawsuit. We supplement our review with three retrospective mini-cases to summarize the lessons learned in a direction to minimize risk arising in clinical management due to telemedicine.