Telemedicine Challenges

Telemedicine, telehealth and related online health information and services advances present a challenge to traditional providers of medicine as well as lawmakers and regulators. Barriers to uniform implementation of telemedicine across the healthcare industry range from; cost, regulatory concerns, reimbursement issues, and lack of standardization among others.

(http://www.beckershospitalreview.com/white-papers/telemedicine-the-top-3-obstacles-facing-clinicians-today.html) cites three main obstacles that typically result in a failed telemedicine implementation include challenge 1-3 as follows:

Challenge #1: Complex telemedicine equipment. One of the primary goals of telemedicine is easy, quicker and better access to patient care. The main

No physician wants to deal with a malpractice lawsuit after a disconnected virtual consult leads a patient to follow the wrong treatment regimen. If possible, state-of-the-art platforms are best. With telemedicine, you have options to buy necessary technology that can sustain your telemedicine needs. Test-runs are vital to prepare hospital staff and ensure they are comfortable running the technology. The complicating evaluations of clinical telemedicine affect the restructuring of the nation's health care delivery system, which has brought with it shifts in institutional missions and priorities and more instability for health personnel, research funding, and project

Most telemedicine applications depend on complex, unwidely and incomplete technical and human infrastructures that are not ubiquitous and user-friendly. The greatest barrier is the lack of knowledge on the meaning of telemedicine and its applications, types, benefits, use of the network, use of store-and-forward telemedicine, and follow-up. Nations in Africa and Asia unlike the U.S., have no established IT infrastructure or installed clinical systems, so there are fewer struggles with integration or interoperability. In addition the lack of standardized assessment of practitioner or clinicians to monitor patients or offer care when there is a medical crisis visa vie community needs by those promoting