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The focus of the AAACN Telehealth Nursing Practice Special Interest Group (TNP SIG) is to advance telehealth nursing and promote it as a specialty practice.
The Clinical Practice/Quality Improvement (CP/QI) Workgroup is one of four strategic committees whose members work toward meeting the SIG's overall goals. The CPQI workgroup is comprised of 12 SIG members, all TNP experts. Four members of the workgroup, the co-authors of this article, constitute the core workgroup.
The 2002-2003 goals of the CPQI workgroup are to define and clarify telehealth terminology and to develop a glossary of terms relevant to telehealth nursing practice.
Clarifying the Terminology
Last year, the CPQI core workgroup identified five key terms: telehealth, telemedicine, telehealth nursing, telephone nursing, and telephone triage. These five terms are currently and historically the primary terms used in telehealth practice, publication, education, and research. They were selected, defined, and described because of their prevalence; inconsistent use; public and professional confusion; and evidence that even telehealth practitioners had difficulty differentiating between the terms (Greenberg & Espensen, 2001).
Based on a thorough review of the literature, the five terms were defined and described and are shown below (also see Table 1). Broad, nonrestrictive definitions were used to differentiate among the terms and accommodate the continually evolving changes in telehealth.
Telehealth
"Telehealth" is the inclusive term used to describe the wide range of services delivered, managed, and coordinated by all health-related disciplines via electronic information and telecommunications technologies.
The term telehealth has replaced "telemedicine" and represents the provision of health care beyond diagnosis and treatment to include services that focus on health maintenance, disease prevention, and education.
The three primary functions of all telehealth services are to increase access, improve outcomes, and contain or reduce the costs of health care. The prefix "tele," meaning "at or over a distance," is affixed to terms describing health care services that use telecommunication technology (such as the telephone, Internet, interactive video, remote sensory devices, and robotics) to transmit information from one site to another. Distance and telecommunication technology therefore are the common denominators of telehealth services.
Telemedicine
"Telemedicine" is a...