In recent decades, life expectancy has significantly increased, and more and more people can enjoy good health even in older age. Medical-scientific progress has indeed allowed for the controlled management of many age-related chronic diseases, improving the life expectancy and quality of life for many patients.
However, these positive aspects are not without a downside, particularly concerning the sharp increase in the population’s needs in terms of healthcare and expenditure. These needs increasingly exceed the healthcare system’s availability, making its reorganization indispensable.
Telemedicine offers significant help in this regard. It’s an innovative healthcare delivery method that leverages extremely advanced technologies for transmitting data (images, diagnoses, reports, etc.) useful for prevention, early diagnosis, monitoring, therapy selection, and in some cases, even therapy execution, specialist consultation, and rehabilitation.
The true innovation of telemedicine is that healthcare services can be performed even if the patient and the specialist are not in the same location. This allows for the creation and organization of new models of remote home healthcare, a true revolution in the concept of the healthcare system.
Telemedicine represents an incredibly powerful tool to combat health inequalities and break down geographical and social barriers, offering an efficient healthcare service to all people suffering from a chronic illness, or at high risk for a disease, even in the presence of critical issues (e.g., patients with mobility difficulties, limited time or economic resources, or those living in geographically or infrastructurally disadvantaged areas).
Telemedicine offers the possibility to decentralize healthcare services, fill professional skill gaps, and ensure continuity and equality of care throughout the territory, with a reduction in national healthcare spending and a faster healthcare bureaucratic system. Furthermore, the ability to offer a better service in terms of speed and availability of information on patients’ health status allows for more timely decision-making in emergency or urgent conditions, which translates into a higher probability of achieving therapeutic success.
Telemedicine should not be understood as a separate medical specialty, but rather as an approach that can complement and support traditional medical services. We hope that this practice will find increasingly widespread application and positive feedback in Italy as well, for faster and more accurate screenings benefiting the many patients suffering from chronic eye diseases, who today are not always able to be monitored, and therefore treated, in the most appropriate way.
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