Many people are surprised to learn about the tremendous shortage of health care professionals, particularly doctors and nurses. However, this problem has been getting much worse in recent years. It’s happening for a number of different reasons.
For one thing, fewer people can afford the costs of medical school these days. Doctors accumulate so much student loan debt that even with their high salaries, it can take them decades to actually break even. Few people want to take that risk in such bad economic times. Doctors spend more than a decade in training these days, which is a massive undertaking. The rising costs of medical malpractice insurance have made it difficult for doctors to enjoy the wealthy and success that they used to have.
Through the laws of supply and demand, nurses make more money than they used to make, which makes the shortage of nurses good for some people. However, they earn every cent of that money, and nurses work under extremely physically demanding conditions day after day. Few people are going to want to enter a profession that is that stressful. Fortunately, telemedicine could make things much easier for the terribly stressed medical professionals and the patients at the same time.
Telemedicine can allow the few doctors and nurses that are in the profession to expand on their capabilities. They will be able to reach more patients at once. They will also be able to accumulate more data on individual patients due to the plethora of trending data that people can get with telemedicine. As such, doctors and nurses will be able to work smarter and not just harder, which will make all the difference in a profession where there is so much scarcity.
Time is the most scarce resource that medical professionals have today. In the United States in particular, medical costs and other medical resources are also in short supply. Telemedicine can help professionals use all of those resources much more effectively.