Dr. Ronald Weinstein, who envisioned the future of telepathology, died Dec. 3 at a medical center in Tucson, AZ. He was 83.

Dr. Weinstein is perhaps the father of a technology now known as telepathology that enables specialists to render diagnoses and other medical opinion from afar using telecommunications technologies. At the time, 1986, the internet was in its early stages, fiber optics were not widely available, and the high-definition screens now common were unknown.

Dr. Weinstein saw early on the potential for telepathology to broaden medical access. “The limited availability of pathologies in some rural locations and areas serviced by federal medical centers is a bottleneck in the United States health care delivery system,” he wrote in Human Pathology in May 1986. By the time he died, his early vision of telemedicine’s possibilities had become an integral part of the health care system, not only in pathology but also in numerous other specialties, bringing clinical services to hundreds of thousands of patients.