Approaching 2014: Is Telemedicine Assessed from The Social Perspective? A Brief 2013 Systematic Review

Recent reviews in Telemedicine (TM) detected methodological flaws in economic assessment. Our brief review addresses the perspective adoption problem, investigating to what extent adopting a broader point of view could have an impact on TM economic studies and consequential diffusion. Out of 486 articles found, 15 studies were selected for full-text assessment. Most of them showed an improvement in methodology if compared with the past TM economic evaluations. However, only 4 papers reported data from the social perspective and among them 3 presented productivity loss. Although some positive results in economic evaluation were observed, to date it is not clear to what extent TM is paid for by third parties or has to be paid by the patients