[Guidelines for the planning and implementation of telemedical applications]

Before a telemedical application can be implemented in practice, various technical, organisational, and legal questions have to be solved. The answers to these questions are, however, in most cases not very obvious. Telemedicine guidelines which could provide a path to follow currently exist only for selected medical fields and are frequently customized for particular medical and technical scenarios. The use of existing telemedicine guidelines in Austrian health care is further complicated by the fact that most of them are based on foreign legal systems. This paper therefore aims to develop general telemedicine guidelines which are appropriate for all application areas of telemedicine in Austrian health care. From nine existing telemedicine guidelines for individual medical fields, two generally applicable guidelines were derived. The corresponding abstraction process was based on a categorization of telemedical applications, which is oriented on the communication partners involved. The derived, general guidelines address seven typical problem domains in the practical application of a telemedical application. As opposed to the existing guidelines, they (1) are independent of special medical fields and are therefore appropriate for all application areas of telemedicine -- also in medical fields where no specific guidelines have existed before; (2) are adapted to the Austrian legal system; (3) provide additional insight for medical fields where specific guidelines have already existed, as they can benefit from recommendations of other medical fields where equivalent telemedical applications are employed.