Telemedicine is a new global trend in providing healthcare services to patients remotely through telecommunications and IT systems. In Viet Nam, the amended Law on Medical Treatment recently passed by the 15^th National Assembly, effective from January 1, 2024, has emphasized the promotion of Telemedicine activities to help achieving the goal of universal health coverage, improving patient access to quality, cost-effective health services anytime, anywhere, especially for less serious, chronic conditions requiring frequent and long-term care.

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In last few years, implementing the Ministry of Health’s Telemedicine Project for 2020-2025 issued on June 22, 2020, hospitals across Viet Nam have piloted the Telemedicine program and gained positive results. More than 3,000 patients have received Telemedicine consultation. Over 1,100 consultation sessions were conducted that connected to 32,000 hub points and saved 155 critical cases. Up to now, most district medical facilities connect Telehealth with provincial hospitals. Provincial hospitals often connect with leading central hospitals. Thanks to the improvement of technology, many serious and critical patients were consulted and saved in a timely manner.

Developing Telehealth in Viet Nam is the mission of the medical industry, a new breakthrough in the 4.0 technology era with the following benefits:

- Shorten the medical distance between localities:

Through the Telmedicine system, leading experts of higher level hospitals will be able to conduct consultations and plan the treatment for patients at lower level hospitals. Thus the patients would not have to struggle to travel to the upper level hospitals and doctors at lower level hospital could have their skills improved. The fact that IT system help medical facilities receiving professional support from higher-level hospitals also contributing to the prevention of disease transmission and reducing patient-overload at upper-level hospitals. Thus, the greatest meaning of Telemedicine is to help the health sector develop synchronously and gradually blurring the gap in professional expertise between doctors at different level of hospitals.

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- Saved many critial and serious patients:

Patients treated at lower-level hospitals will be able to have medical examination and treatment services from leading specialized hospitals in the country, help improving treatment efficiency, especially in cases of severe illness, rare diseases and difficult to diagnose cases.

It can be concluded that the development of Telemedicine is one of the important tasks for the health sector to help improving of the quality of medical examination and treatment, bringing medical technical services closer to the people, ensuring fairness in accessing health services, meeting the increasing demand for medical examination and treatment of the people and reducing patient-overload in central hospitals.