Get Diagnosed from the Comfort of Your Home

As important as it is to routinely check our skin for irregularities, it’s often far more important to have a skin specialist, or dermatologist, check for us. This is especially true when something concerns you or your regular doctor. But who has the time to make an in-person appointment with a specialist when seeing your regular doctor once a year is hard enough? And more often than not, you may not even have a dermatologist’s office anywhere near you.

Dermatologists have the answer. They are now utilizing video calls, or “telemedicine,” to perform checkups and diagnose their patients’ skin issues. A new study shows that dermatologists using this technology found that patient care was typically enhanced for those that can’t easily make it to a specialist’s office.

“Live interactive technology is nearly equivalent to physically being in the room with a patient,” said April Armstrong, the study’s senior author and a UC Davis assistant professor of dermatology. “It enables us to see the skin problems, and we can have real-time discussions with patients and their providers as if we were in the room together. Our study confirms that it is an effective tool to improve patient outcomes.”

Teledermatology consultations from this study resulted in diagnostic changes for nearly 70 percent of patients — this ultimately leads toward better patient care, more accurate diagnoses, and healthier patients as their treatments are updated.

If you need to see dermatologist and don’t have one near you, or if you simply don’t have the time, ask your doctor about telemedicine and better your chances of getting the help you need.

To read more about this study and telemedicine, click here for the source of this post.

---