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THREE YEARs after the American Academy of Ambulatory Care Nurses (AAACN, 1997) defined telephone nursing and established practice standards for the profession's newest specialty practice, telephone nursing is now identified as one of many "tele" services (for example, telenursing, telehealth, telemedicine). This may lead to both patients and providers asking, is telephonenursing telenursing? Is telenursing telehealth? And, what are the relationships among these and other "tele" terms? The purpose of this article is to clarify the tele-terms and their relationship to telenursing, and discuss issues specifically relevant to telenursing. Figure 1 presents a schematic of the primary teleterms.
Tele-Services
Terms with the prefix tele, meaning distance, are used to describe the many health care services provided via telecommunications. The common denominators of teleservices are distance and technology. Teleservices use telecommunication technology to transmit information from one site to another. Applications in clinical practice, research, and administration include telephone consultation, triage, followup (National Council of State Boards of Nursing [NCSBN], 1997; Pond, 2000), e-mail inquires and advice (Yensen, 1996), distance learning (Connors, 1997), videoconferencing (Chaffee, 1999; NCSBN, 1997), videomonitoring (Borchers & Kee, 1999; Chaffee, 1999), and digital photography (Cobb, McDonald, & Steinkamph, 2000).
Telehealth
Telehealth, the delivery of health services over distances, has replaced telemedicine as the inclusive term used to describe the wide range of services delivered by all health-related disciplines (American Nurses Association [ANA], 1996; Chaffee, 1999; Connors, 1997; Helmlinger & Milholland, 1997). The term telecare is comparable to telehealth, a very generic term referring to the delivery of care over distance. The more specific terms (for example, telenursing or telemedicine) may be more informative when a discussion of a telehealth practice is focused solely within the purview of one health care profession (Milholland, 1995).
Telemedicine
Telemedicine is broadly defined as medicine practiced at a distance (Wootton, 2000). Specialty applications of telemedicine include, but are not limited to, teleradiology, telepathology, telepsychiatry, teledermatology, and teleoncology.
Telenursing
Telenursing, the delivery of nursing care and services using telecommunications, increases access to nursing care interventions for clients in remote or distant locations (Chaffee, 1999; Helmlinger & Milholland, 1997; Yensen, 1996). Although typically associated with telephone nursing, telenursing has grown far beyond the use of the telephone, now incorporating a vast array of telecommunications technologies (for example, interactive video,...
