Economic impact and cost savings of teledermatology units compared to conventional monitoring at hospitals in southern Spain.

Introduction: Asynchronous teledermatology (TD) has undergone exponential growth in the past decade, allowing better diagnosis. Moreover, it saves both cost and time and reduces the number of visits involving travel and opportunity cost of time spent on visits to the hospital. The present study performed a cost-saving analysis of TD units and assessed whether they offered a cheaper alternative to conventional monitoring (CM) in hospitals from the perspective of public health-care systems (PHS) and patients.

Methods: This study was a retrospective assessment of 7030 patients. A cost-saving analysis comparing TD units to CM for patients at the Hospital de Poniente was performed over a period of one year. The TD network covered the Hospital de Poniente reference area (Spain) linked to 37 primary care (PC) centres that belonged to the Poniente Health District of Almeria.

Results: We observed a significant cost saving for TD units compared to participants in the conventional follow-up group. From the perspective of a PHS, there was a cost saving of 31.68% in the TD group (€18.59 TD vs. €27.20 CM) during the follow-up period. The number of CM visits to the hospital reduced by 38.14%. From the patients' perspective, the costs were lower, and the cost saving was 73.53% (€5.45 TD vs. €20.58 CM).

Discussion: The cost-saving analysis showed that the TD units appeared to be significantly cheaper compared to CM.