摘要：Changes in health care policies, demographics, and technology have presented new opportunitiesfor the delivery of medical care services and information to rural communities. Telemedicine—the use ofelectronic information and communications technologies to provide and support health care whendistances separates the participants—is one technology that has impacted the efficiency of delivery ofrural health care services. This paper presents an overview of the telemedicine technologies, governmentinvolvement in support of telemedicine, evaluation efforts to date for these technologies, and issues thatneed to be addressed in designing an economic-based framework to evaluate the net benefits oftelemedicine technologies to rural communities and consumers. An evaluation framework needs to becapable of quantifying the tradeoffs among access to health care services, the costs of delivery of a givenlevel of services, and changes in the quality of the service that is being delivered via electroniccommunications; and how these tradeoffs shift as the level of telemedicine and the technology changes. The framework that is proposed is based on models of consumer behavior that incorporate discretechoices among quality differentiated sites.
关键词：rural health care;telemedicine;averted costs;economic benefits;telecommunications technology;R0
