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There exist many peculiarities in establishing and maintaining a telemedicine service in low resource areas.

Telemedicine, as is the case for other new technology, is faced with the problem of acceptability especially in the developing world. Also, due to inadequate infrastructure for telecommunications, the advantages of telemedicine may not be available in some locations

The primary health care level stands to benefit greatly from telemedicine as health professionals in rural settings can have access to urban health facilities for diagnosis and treatment of illnesses that are uncommon and difficult to manage.

Schema of Telemedicine in Primary Health Care

[edit] projects on telemedicine in low resource settings

A number of resources and initiatives on telemedicine in low resource settings have been established over the past years.

• The dgroups community on "telemedicine in low resource settings" is a discussion group/mailing list on this topic. A wiki has been set up for this group as telemedlounge.net.
• The Swinfen Charitable Thrust has been operating a consultation network for hospitals in developing countries.
• The EHAS programme has been running telemedicine services in latin America for some years.
• The TIER project at University of California in Berkeley is including telemedicine components in some of its projects, e.g. in Ghana.
• The [http:/ipath.ch iPath association] of University of Basel is operating a telepathology and teledermatology network that is extensively used by doctors in low resource settings. The iPath software developed in that project is actively used by several projects.