By Kendall Madden
The Stanford Daily

A patient walks into a clinic in a rural town in India, talks to a doctor, receives a diagnosis and a prescription, and leaves the office. Sounds like a normal visit to the doctor, doesn’t it? Except in this case, the doctor is thousands of miles away and conversed with the patient via video camera.

Impossible? Don’t tell that to Stanford doctors.

Rather than traveling around the world to visit patients, American and Indian doctors are hoping to revolutionize medicine in rural areas with a package of technologies known as telemedicine, through which patients correspond with a doctor through videoconferencing, audio communication technology and e-mail.

Doctors are in desperate need in rural areas around the world. In many developing countries, the idea of an accessible general practice doctor is dream — a specialist is even less likely. In rural India, for example, there is one doctor on average for every 15,500 people. Specialists are only found in the metropolitan areas that are not accessible for the majority of the rural population.

Many enterprises are springing up on the basis of new telemedicine technology to alleviate the scarcity of doctors and specialists in these other areas of the world.

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Shuji Yamaguchi came to the Digital Vision Program with an innovative plan to lower the language barriers dividing humanitarian workers around the globe. He soon changed focus, however, as he discovered that a lack of access to news reports was a far more pressing need for his constituents. But rather than derail his vision, this realization actually served to expand his notion of how he might help aid workers overcome linguistic hurdles in the future.

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