Telemedicine: Lessons for–and from–emerging technology policy
Key Points
Telemedicine demonstrates that hypothetical concerns—imperfect diagnoses, loss of personal relationships—are fixed as the technology evolves or become unimportant as the technology shifts public norms. By contrast, benefits are often unexpected and unpredictable—the value of telemedicine to prison inmates or schoolchildren, for example, are perhaps obvious in hindsight but certainly were not as clear before the technology became reasonably common. Telemedicine thus serves as a valuable data point that, in the long run, regulatory openness to new developments ultimately pays dividends.
Image credit: verbaska