1. Assess your community’s access to health care technology and determine how that access (or lack thereof) impacts your community economically. For people living in the rural areas, the distance to main metropolitan centres often places restrictions on access to essential services, including specialist healthcare. Telemedicine provides one possible answer. Many different terms such as telehealth, telecare, online health and E-health have been used but they all have a common meaning, i.e. the use of information and communication technologies to deliver health care services at a distance. The motivation for investigating the use of telemedicine for different clinical problems include large distances between patients and specialists, isolated health professionals requiring specialist support and/or education, and situations where there is no other alternative, for example space flight or patients at sea, as well as the pervasive and pragmatic issue of cost. Are health care dollars better spent on sending the clinician to the patient, bringing the patient to the clinician, or by facilitating the consultations using telemedicine? Modern advances in information communication technologies have seen developments in the different mechanisms available for conducting telemedicine, from Morse code to the ordinary telephone and more recently the Internet. The different telecommunication networks required to support these communication technologies have also advanced. The plain old telephone system (POTS) is widely available in both industrialised and developing countries
, cheap, well known and can support ordinary telephony, video telephony and Internet access. Newer digital networks such as the integrated services digital network (ISDN) and broadband technologies are becoming more widely available and more affordable for rural telemedicine.