Introduction to Telepathology

Abstract

The practice of medicine has been subject to economic, social, scientific, and technological forces that have altered the practice of the profession over the last several decades. In many cases, pressures have been applied by forces that have seemingly contradictory goals. Economic forces applied by the evolution of managed care have led to a reorganization of the medical infrastructure in the United States, which have resulted in increasing numbers of patients for individual providers to care for and the unavailability of medical care to larger and larger segments of the population. Concurrently, medicine has been under constant pressure, from both inside and outside the profession to find a way to care for the medically underserved, not only those created by the economic restructuring, but those who were underserved in the past, such as the geographically remote. While the appeasement of contradictory forces and pressures on priorities in medicine at a national level are a laborious, complicated process involving many social, economic, and philosophical issues, medical practitioners are having to deal with the problem of providing care to more and more patients dispersed over a greater and greater geographic area on a daily basis. Pathology by its nature has been particularly prone to the pressures and problems of centralized care. Fortunately, advancements in the technology of telecommunications and computer science have offered practitioners an effective option in dealing with this problem.