A Telemedicine and Telehealth Conceptual Managerial Framework: Opportunities, Challenges, and Trends in the Healthcare Promotion

The combination of technology and medicine presents new opportunities to transform the provision of health services more effectively and sustainably. Telemedicine emerges as a tool to face the challenges of access to health, but it also faces challenges to be popularized among health professionals and the population. From an economic point of view, telemedicine can be seen as a way to increase the rate of preventive medicine, to reduce the high rate of hospital occupancy and worsening of diseases, reducing spending on hospitalizations and surgeries. And from a social perspective, it can democratize access to health services, offering more health care to reach more remote areas. The purpose of this article is to make a framework of the literature found at Scopus that relates the themes Telemedicine, Telehealth, and Latin America to analyze the participation of these concepts in health promotion. In view of the articles found, there was a low rate of publication in global journals, but several articles talking about the insertion of these concepts in the education of health professionals. Another important factor observed is how the technological structure and the socioeconomic vulnerability found in Latin America are points that need government assistance to be successful in the provision of health. And that the concepts of telemedicine and telehealth can help the country’s development by reaching people and places where health care is scarce.