Telemedicine Acceptance and Implementation in Developing Countries: Benefits, Categories, and Barriers

Context: Distributing health care services in remote and rural areas have become a major health problem for many developingcountries. Telemedicine presents solutions to developing countries for better disease prevention, disease management, emergencyservices and practicing medicine in areas with limited access to healthcare services and facilities. Although the willingness of developingcountries to accept telemedicine and incorporate it into their health care systems is rising, due to multidisciplinary and complicatedcharacteristics of telemedicine, they will face challenges and barriers which will slow down their progress. This literaturereview attempts to explain the benefits, categories and barriers for acceptance and implementation of telemedicine in developingcountries.Evidence Acquisition: This study was conducted in 2016. The main question was how is the general attitude to the acceptance anduse of telemedicine in developing countries and what problems they are facing for the use of telemedicine. To find the solutions,we searched articles in two main databases, PubMed and Scopus, with the keywords and expressions related to the subject of thestudy (developing countries, telemedicine, tele-health, barriers, challenges, adoption, and acceptance). Totally, 103 articles wereextracted. Duplicate articlesandarticles published before 1998 were eliminatedandthe remaining ones were screened for eligibilityin accordance with subject of the study. The result was 47 articles from PubMed and 5 articles from Scopus. This review is basedmainly on preliminary results, opinions and predictions. As limitations of our study, we limited ourselves to PubMed and Scopusdatabases and also reviewed articles only in English language.Results: The study did not find any article that totally disagrees with the implementation of telemedicine in developing countries.Most of the articles contain positive points associated with the use of telemedicine with respect to the barriers and challenges.Conclusions: Despite hopeful progresses in telemedicine, developing countries are facing many problems in their way toward successfulapplication of telemedicine. High cost and cultural resistance are considered as the main barriers for developing countriesin their approach to apply telemedicine. Developing countries must be fully aware that investment in telemedicine will not inevitablyyield clinical or economic benefits in short time. They must consider barriers and various outcomes of telemedicine beforeaccepting and applying it.

کلیدواژه ها:

Telemedicine ، Developing Countries ، Acceptance ، Advantages ، Barriers ، Challenges