Towards a Telehealth Service Planning and Implementation: A Research about the Requirements, Barriers, Benefits and Risks

Abstract

The implementation of telehealth service is a complex task with many requirements and issues to accomplish. The global opinion is that it can provide many benefits. The objective of this paper is to identify the main requirements that must be accomplish to implement a telehealth service in order to increase the healthcare services quality and economic sustainability. The dimensions have different aspects including citizens themselves, social, healthcare providers, politics makers, academic institutions, normalization organizations and industry. To narrow the study, these dimensions were merged to the following domains: Quality of the processes of the healthcare organization; Economic and financial resources; Workforce planning, healthcare planning, and responsibilities; Infrastructure and facilities resources for telehealth services; Adoption of new Information Architectures capable to share information and knowledge; Adoption of new technology resources to permit the telehealth services; Education and training. The study was conducted in Portugal and the used methodology was a systematic literature review about published norms, guidelines and technical reports, followed by the gathering of secondary data and interviews to the decision makers. The existent education and training courses across Europe were also considered. The conclusions are a set of requirements considering healthcare processes and workforce planning, infrastructures facilities, education and training of the professionals, adoption of normalized information architectures, implementation of different processes of quality management and the expected outcomes are improvements quality and on health economy. Some potential and possible metrics are also proposed.