Understanding telecardiology success and pitfalls by a systematic review

Cardiology is the clinical area where death causes are more frequent than in any other clinical area, and it could benefit from telemedicine. At present, assessment about telecardiology application are hard to find, and sometimes can be found in review article about telemedicine, but there is a lack of review on telecardiology application literature. So we reviewed studies regarding telemedicine applications on cardiology specialty.Sixty-one articles were selected, searching the PubMed database for all years the database were available. All considered articles were published on peer reviewed telemedicine and biomedical journals, from 1992 to 2004. We defined an evaluation grid for the articles in our research result set. Each article was reviewed and catalogued, identifying: 1) Article identification, 2) Content description, 3) Telemedicine manifesto classification, 4) Telemedicine system paradigm, 5) Involved actors.Most of the analysed literature referred only to feasibility studies, pilot projects and to short-term outcomes, for example only 21 cases reported a project duration greater than one year. The method proposed can be used to analyse literature on others telemedicine specialties.