Telemedicine. Is it more used in rural areas or in cities?

If we consider the data from the latest report from the National Telecommunications and Information Administration and the Economics and Statistics of the United States, Americans use to:

1.- Job search, 73% of the unemployed in the U.S. looking for work in this way.
2.- Citizen participation.
3.- Health research and finding information in general, but also used as a vehicle for professional interaction and more innovative telemedicine.
4.- Other activities as social network use, blogging, etc..

We can see that Health would be a Trend Topic on the needs of American citizens regarding the use of the Internet.

Although telemedicine is offered as a tool for communication between patients and professionals and provides unique opportunities for the treatment and prevention of chronic conditions in rural or remote medical centers of reference, this report shows that it is more prevalent use in urban populations, at least in the U.S.

The base of this report include data from 53,000 households during the month of July 2011. In that we can to find that Internet users of urban areas were more participants in this type of medicine, than users of rural areas, utilization rates were 8% and 4% respectively. The 7% of Internet users reported that connect to the network, to access medical records, participate in a video conference with the health professional or remote procedures as heart rate monitoring. The data show disparities in income and education level, but few racial disparities. 11% of users with incomes over $ 100,000 has devoted time to activities related to telemedicine and only 4% of users with incomes below $ 25,000 have reported such use.

If we analyze this report with details, we can conclude that bring telemedicine to rural areas is a government decision as part of a health program, and pursues the objectives of bridging the gap by using this technology, reducing costs and making life easier for users in a large number of specialties, not replace traditional medicine, and come through the use of this technology to urban users, enable an optimization of health services that will be accessible in a way more functional and more comfortable for many users. What it is clear from this report is that telemedicine is a trend of investment, development and use and is not intended to replace anything, just provide tools to optimize health services offering the same in a more accessible , more functional, with less cost and saving all kinds of distances, physical, cultural, economic, etc..