IBPS PO 2024 · Question 203 of 260

Directions (98-102): Read the following passage and answer the given questions. Telemedicine, the practice of consulting physicians through video calls, phone lines, or messaging apps rather than in a clinic, has moved from a niche convenience to a mainstream feature of healthcare delivery within the span of a single decade. Its proliferation across both metropolitan hospitals and rural health centres has been driven by a simple promise: that distance and time should no longer determine whether a patient receives timely medical attention. For families living hours away from the nearest specialist, a fifteen-minute video consultation can replace what was once a full day of travel, lost wages, and uncertain waiting-room queues. Yet the very convenience that makes telemedicine attractive to patients also introduces constraints that traditional, face-to-face consultations do not carry. A physician examining a patient in person can observe posture, smell, skin tone, and subtle tremors that a grainy video feed often fails to capture, and can perform a physical palpation that no camera can replicate. Consequently, while telemedicine excels at follow-up visits, prescription renewals, and preliminary triage, it remains a poor substitute for conditions that demand hands-on examination, such as suspected fractures or abdominal pain of unclear origin. This tension between accessibility and diagnostic depth places telemedicine in an unusual position: it simultaneously widens the reach of healthcare and narrows the range of ailments that can be safely treated through a screen. Hospital administrators who once viewed the technology purely as a cost-saving tool are now compelled to stratify cases carefully, routing only appropriate complaints to virtual queues while reserving in-person slots for anything requiring direct examination. A further complication lies in the unevenness of digital access itself. Elderly patients unfamiliar with smartphone applications, and households in regions with unreliable internet connectivity, often find the supposed convenience of telemedicine transformed into an additional barrier rather than a bridge. Clinics that fail to offer a simple phone- call fallback risk excluding precisely the population that stood to benefit most from reduced travel. Ultimately, telemedicine's promise will be fulfilled not by replacing physical clinics but by working alongside them, absorbing the routine and the urgent-but-simple cases so that scarce specialist time can be devoted to what a screen still cannot diagnose. What dual nature of telemedicine's influence on healthcare access is emphasized in the passage?

Reading comprehension

1. ATelemedicine widens the reach of healthcare while simultaneously narrowing the range of ailments that can be safely diagnosed through a screen.Correct
2. BTelemedicine reduces treatment costs for hospitals while increasing costs for patients who must travel to clinics.
3. CTelemedicine improves diagnostic accuracy for all conditions while reducing the number of specialists required.
4. DTelemedicine eliminates the need for physical clinics while increasing dependence on smartphone technology among the elderly.
5. ETelemedicine expands access for urban patients while making healthcare entirely inaccessible to rural communities.