Towards a shared service centre for telemedicine: Telemedicine in Denmark, and a possible way forward

Although evidence of the effectiveness of telemedicine is accumulating, knowledge of how to make best use of telemedicine is limited. This article presents results from a multi-stakeholder project that developed a new concept, a 'shared service centre' for telemedicine that is envisioned as working across different telemedical initiatives to support the implementation and wider adoption of telemedicine. One year of participatory design and analysis of the shared service centre concept involved stakeholders, such as clinicians, patients, technicians, policy makers, lawyers, economists and information technology architects. More than 100 people contributed to the findings. Most of the ideas generated for potential centre support for telemedicine could be categorised under four service categories. The need for such support services was verified in the cases investigated, and by agreement among stakeholders from regional health authorities, municipalities, and general practice. Therefore, it is probable that a shared service centre could help enable the wider deployment of telemedicine.

In this article, we use 'telemedicine' as an umbrella term for all the 'tele-' labels that are sometimes used rather indiscriminately to denote the use of information and technology to support healthcare services, including 'telehealth', 'telemonitoring', 'telehomecare', 'e-health', and so on. As per our definition, telemedicine may be synchronous and/or asynchronous, and may apply to any information and technology-based means of connecting healthcare actors and the patient, such as video communication, e-mail, electronic monitoring equipment, and Internet portals. Furthermore, the term 'telemedical initiative' covers projects in which telemedicine is conducted by a temporary project organisation, as well as self-contained telemedicine services used in daily, clinical practice in existing organisations.