Abstract

Concerns about the availability and access to health care have impelled the utilization of telemedicine specially during the past couple of years. The clinical application of telemedicine includes using available technology and electronic communication as a method of simplifying and facilitating patient care from the evaluation to reaching diagnosis and delivering management and treatment plan. Our aim is to explore the efficacy of telemedicine in the scope of burns, wound care, and scars management.
Methods: This is a literature review of published articles on PubMed and Google Scholar discussing the use of telemedicine in burns, wounds, and scars management. Articles were sorted based on their significance to plastic and reconstructive surgery, then reviewed to discuss their applications, benefits, and limitations of telemedicine in practice.
Results: A total of 216 articles were identified in the initial query. (126 articles for burn management, 24 articles for wound management, 66 articles in Tele-dermatology, only 7 articles of which focused on skin lesions and scars). Most of these articles described the benefit of telemedicine mostly showing progress in postoperative monitoring, increased access to patients in rural settings, while proving to be cost effective. These studies were conducted in 14 different countries where most of them took place in UK, USA, and China. No systematic or official models were observed.
Conclusion: Telemedicine is increasingly progressing in the efficiency of assessing burns, wounds, and scars on many levels especially with the help of rising technologies, still it’s use, in this regard, is limited to only 14 countries, where telemedicine was utilized mostly in burn management, while there was minimal use of telemedicine in scars management under plastic surgery. Moreover, there were no generalized or systematic implementations of models in the reviewed articles.

Keywords:Telemedicine; Telehealth; Plastic surgery; Burns and wounds; Scars management