The move advances the quality of rural healthcare, which in many small towns is provided by a health aide, whose training sometimes equals but rarely exceeds that of an emergency medical technician. Telehealth services will raise the quality and speed of healthcare in remote areas, and reduce overall costs associated with Medivacs and delayed treatments. Prior to telehealth, air evacuation was often the only treatment option for a patient in small, remote villages in Alaska, two-thirds of which are not even connected by the state's road system. If the parents don't have to lease an airplane and fly the child from the village to a regional center in Nome or Kotzebue, or, when necessary, all the way to Anchorage or Seattle, the cost savings are phenomenal. In the past, when a medical problem required a diagnosis, the village health aide would describe the symptoms over a telephone line to a physician who might be hundreds of miles away.
Physicians can see the patient.