Telemedicine: a review of its use and a proposal for application in psychiatric consultation

Telemedicine is a newly emerging concept in clinical medicine. This article is a review of the recent English language literature on the topic, and a proposal to utilize the concepts of telemedicine in clinical psychiatry. To date internal medicine, radiology and pathology have been the most active fields in medicine in utilizing telemedicine. However, psychiatry, because of the nature of its clinical practice, is in many ways ideally suited for the utilization of telemedicine in underserved areas.