Last week’s program was presented by Rotarian Mike Arndt.  Mike’s guest speaker was Stephen Rossiter, President/Owner of “Call the Doc” telemedicine.  Joining Stephen was Jennifer Chamberlain, Vice President of Corporate Development and Ricardo Garcia, Vice President of Latin Corporate Development.  Telemedicine is the use of telecommunication and information technologies to provide clinical health care at a distance. It helps eliminate distance barriers and can improve access to medical services that would often not be consistently available in distant rural communities. It is also used to save lives in critical care and emergency situations.  Although there were distant precursors to telemedicine, it is essentially a product of 20th century telecommunication and information technologies. These technologies permit communications between patient and medical staff with both convenience and fidelity, as well as the transmission of medical, imaging and health informatics data from one site to another.  Early forms of telemedicine achieved with telephone and radio have been supplemented with videotelephony, advanced diagnostic methods supported by distributed client/server applications, and additionally with telemedical devices to support in-home care.  According to the AMA, 70% of doctor visits are unnecessary.   Telemedicine is a way to reduce these unnecessary visits…within 15 minutes you are “face to face” with a doctor.  Telemediine is your medical lifeline for quick, reliable, high-quality healthcare that is revolutionizing Healthcare today.  There are presently more than 20 million “lives” using telemedicine today around the world.  You can talk to a doctor, get prescriptions sent to your pharmacy, enroll in specialized drug programs, and complete diagnostic lab tests and imaging on-line without seeing a doctor.  With Doctors retiring faster than new doctors coming in, medical schools having 39% fewer graduates, malpractice insurance, affordable health care act issues, and others, Telemedicine is a solution for a lot of healthcare problems.  With the national average of more than 4 hours wait time at emergency rooms, the quickly growing technology and 70 million American’s missing work every year because of illness and medical appointments telemedicine will continue to grow in popularity and as a “supplemental” and an “option” to traditional healthcare.  -submitted by Mike Arndt