Regional Telemedicine Forum (RTF)

The forum is a european meeting ground for clinicians and decision makers in the health services. In the forum they can discuss effective methods for implementing telemedicine in clinical practice. The primary focus will be the chronic diseases COPD, diabetes and cardio-vascular disease.

Background

Telemedicine has reached maturity, but the technology has yet to be implemented widely. The RTF partnership arises from a growing awareness among European regions that there is much to learn from exploring alternative models of telemedicine related policies and in addition, from practical implementation of telemedicine services already provided by other European regions.

The partnership wants to begin focusing at regional policies which can assure wider implementation and deployment of telemedicine services at regional level. The current question of the regional authorities is what policy recommendations can help them to move from the development of individual telemedicine services at hospital level to wider implementation and deployment of telemedicine services at regional level.

Project description

The overall objective of the RTF project is to create a mixed network of advanced and less advanced regions, aiming at identification and analysis of good practices and barriers within telemedicine at clinical, evaluation, strategy and market levels.

In this way it will be possible to scrutinize the barriers for telemedicine at the different levels, and eventually to suggest policy recommendations to European regions which can help them in their efforts to release the potential of wider implementation and deployment of telemedicine services. 