Telehealth in the Developing World

Abstract

tion via high-tech telecommunications technologies. While saving time, energy and money to visit a medical specialist, patients will be given more opportunities to get high-quality healthcare services. From a healthcare provider’s perspective, telehealth has the benefits of improving the continuity of care, offering an opportunity of continuing education and increasing cooperation in diagnosis and research activities. Above all, telehealth is a means of improving the limited and imbalanced medical resource supply structure that the service can be directly provided to those in poor areas or prisoners. In fact, telehealth is a concept in which the interest and care for those who want the minimum services at least to stay healthy should be considered along with the technology itself. Many people from the developing world have suffered from limited medical resources and poor and inappropriate healthcare services. In particular, the problem was far more serious in rural and remote communities. Therefore, telehealth could be more meaningful in the developing world than advanced countries where medical resources are already abundant, and the access to high-quality healthcare services and excellent healthcare professionals is much easier. Wootton, one of the editors of this book, pointed out that even though a lot of articles have been published on the concept of telemedicine in the developing world, a success story has been barely told. He has attempted to collect and suggest a representative cross-section of the very wide range of work that has been carried out in this book. He also mentioned that the related policies and clinical and educational matters that are covered in this book insisted that this book includes a state-of-the art review of telemedicine in the developing world and provides the base for a high-level operation manual. In fact, various telemedicine projects and related case studies which have been performed in poor areas in the developTelehealth in the Developing World