Dr  Jones: The new technology dubbed telemedicine will provide sustained improvement in at least rural patient care since it allows rural physicians to televise medical examinations to specialists who live at great distances -- specialists who will thus be able to provide advice the rural patient would otherwise not receive  Dr  Carabella: Not so  Telemedicine might help rural patient care initially  However, small hospitals will soon realize that they can minimize expenses by replacing physicians with technicians who can use telemedicine to transmit examinations to large medical centers, resulting in fewer patients being able to receive traditional, direct medical examination  Eventually, it will be the rare individual who ever gets truly personal attention
Hence, rural as well as urban patient care will suffer
citing evidence that Dr. Jones lacks the professional training to judge the case at issue