Concordance and Time Estimation of Store-and-forward Mobile Teledermatology Compared to Classical Face-to-face Consultation.
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Date
2015-01-15
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Abstract
Smartphones have overcome the limitations of image quality seen in older devices and opened a new field of telemedicine called mobile teledermatology Technological advances and the need to reduce health service costs will strongly promote the development of telemedicine For this reason we evaluated the concordance between store and forward mobile teledermatology and the classical face to face dermatological visit We also measured the time taken to submit a teleconsultation using a smartphone Before conventional face to face visit a final year resident of the three year course for general practitioners collected medical history took digital images of skin diseases with a smartphone and measuring the time required to complete this operation transmitted them to an expert teledermatologist In 391 patients we obtained a concordance between face to face and store and forward diagnosis of 91 05 Cohen coefficient 0 906 On average only few minutes needs to be added to a normal visit to transmit the cases to an expert teledermatologist