Telemedicine in the USA: standardization through information management and technical applications

In this article, we describe the need for telemedicine standards and classify various standards of telemedicine. The emerging issues in telecommunications standards, the application of these standards in the health care industry, and future development directions of telemedicine standards are described. Especially, the telemedicine code standardization of drugs and health care providers, multimedia-conferencing-based ISO telemedicine standards, information security management, wireless technology advances for telemedicine using sensor networks, and future standardization issues and considerations are introduced and discussed in detail.