Abstract
This issue completes volume 24 of Telemedicine and e-Health and anticipates the next volume, volume 25, which will mark our Silver Anniversary. Kudos are extended to our excellent authors for choosing this journal for sharing your work. Many thanks are extended to our hundreds of reviewers who have, with great expertise and thought, edited these articles. They do reject some, but customarily offer encouraging suggestions for better work in the future. They call for revisions for most submissions, with critiques designed to make the work better understood and helpful to our readers. The authors are extraordinary in taking those criticisms and incorporating them into articles that we are very pleased to publish in the interest of our readers and authors.
All our reviewers have published in this journal and have established their expertise through this accomplishment as well as having a keen understanding of the field and its importance to health care. Our authors are from all over the world and bring original research, reviews, opinions, and case reports to advance our discipline. They speak to us from a wide variety of specialties including technical, administrative, commercial, clinical, and humanitarian. We are guided by a superb editorial board comprised of seasoned authors who then stand out as reviewers and then advise your editors with great experience and commitment. They represent the leadership of the American Telemedicine Association, industry, and academia. The process of bringing telemedicine reports to publication is well established and efficient. We are not perfect, but we recognize our duty to our readers, authors, and publisher. We are responsive to criticisms ourselves and over the years the process has evolved as the discipline has morphed from technical oddity to the forefront of health care.
Telemedicine is dynamic; it changes with the technology, environment, clinical expertise, and industry. The technology used in telemedicine and telehealth has evolved from analog video using microwave and satellite systems, to social media, artificial intelligence and robotics. The field has moved from technology-rich centers to the home, workplace, and mobile patients. Isolated practitioners are now integrated into enormous virtual medical staffs bringing full knowledge to patients. Telemedicine has changed with the disease burden experienced worldwide with increasing emphasis on chronic disease management, epidemic, disasters, remote sites of need, and emerging diseases. New disciplines of gerontology, integrated intensive care, and outreach to first responders are part of the panoply. Furthermore, telemedicine tools are fully incorporated into education at all levels. The experience of telemedicine has even moved from this and similar journals to the clinical specialty journals with their own guidelines and applications that may not be new to the general field of telemedicine, but are highly specific to the requirements of a particular clinical specialty.
We encourage all our readers, authors, and reviewers to make us accountable to your sense of direction that telemedicine should be taking. We know from your downloads what you are reading, and this encourages us. More input is desirable. Your opinion pieces are encouraged, and your thoughtful reviews are needed. Hold us to a high standard of accuracy, quality, and timeliness. Your editors extend to you best wishes for the New Year and look forward to a silver anniversary volume that will surprise and reward each of you as you embrace this field and integrate it in your clinical practice, pedagogy, and the development of new and innovative technologies!