The doctor will FaceTime you now: Online doctors meet telepatients in a virtual hospital

The outbreak of the COVID-19 pandemic has led health professionals to introduce and embrace telemedicine or telehealth, a subfield of digital health that provides health services at a distance using telecommunication technologies. Although remote healthcare services may seem like a new trend, the practice of telemedicine goes back to the 1970s and its history closely follows the evolution of communication and information technologies (Maheu, Whitten, Allen 2001; Scott, Mars 2016). Prior to March 2020, the use of telemedicine was limited to a few medical specialties (e.g. radiology, neurology and surgery) that integrated telemedicine technologies into their clinical practice (e.g. telestroke). The rapid spread of SARS-Cov2, which limited face-to-face contact, has given a strong boost to the use of these technologies by physicians who have been forced to adopt telehealth platforms (Kichloo et al. 2020). This proposal aims to provide a qualitative and quantitative analysis of the main telemedicine neologisms - not included in the Oxford English Dictionary - that have emerged in this subfield to define online doctoring (Schneider 2018). Neologisms will be retrieved from the websites of the top 20 hospitals in the US, UK, Australia and analysed in terms of frequency, morphological productivity and semantic extension (Mattiello 2022; Cabré Castellvì, Estopa, Vargas-Sierra, 2012; Plag 2003). Among these new words, there are, indeed, various semantic neologisms (e.g. e-patient), combining forms or existing words modified by affixes to redefine doctors (e.g. virtual doctor), patients (e.g. telepatient), clinical services (e.g. e-check-in), medical specialties (e.g. teleophtalmology), health services (e.g. urgent care televisit), clinical examinations (e.g. virtual musculoskeletal physical examination), patient management (e.g. remote patient monitoring) and generic or specific treatments (e.g. virtual care, telehealth medication abortion). These new terms have become part of the common vocabulary of physicians and patients opting for telecare, as most healthcare providers in the US and UK are using telemedicine either partially or fully even though the pandemic is over, or rather endemic.