THEORETICAL AND METHODOLOGICAL FOUNDATIONS FOR THE COMPARATIVE STUDY OF TELEMEDICINE TERMINOLOGY

The rapid integration of information and communication technologies into healthcare has created a large and continuously developing layer of telemedicine terminology. Terms such as telemedicine, telehealth, digital health, eHealth, mHealth, remote patient monitoring, virtual consultation and telecare are widely used in scientific, clinical and institutional discourse, yet their conceptual boundaries are not always identical. This article examines the theoretical and methodological foundations for the comparative study of telemedicine terminology and argues that specialized units should be analyzed as elements of an interconnected conceptual system rather than as isolated lexical forms. Particular attention is paid to concept-oriented terminology theory, definitional and componential analysis, structural and semantic comparison, corpus methods, contextual analysis and the identification of interlingual equivalence. The article also describes a practical sequence for comparative research: corpus formation, term extraction, conceptual classification, analysis of definitions, structural-semantic comparison, contextual verification, equivalence assessment and terminographic representation. The study demonstrates that the combination of linguistic and terminological methods makes it possible to distinguish full, partial and zero equivalence, to identify competing variants and to formulate recommendations for standardization. Such an approach is important for multilingual medical communication, specialized translation, terminology databases and the development of consistent national terminology in the rapidly changing field of digital healthcare.