Telemedicine technology assessment part I: setup and validation of a quality control system.

The remarkable development of telemedicine applications has brought about the need for a telemedicine quality control system to prevent application failures and guarantee users. The aim of this paper was to report on the setup of a quality control system and validate it on a testing set of telemedicine products and services. The quality control system followed two main phases. Phase I was focused on data acquisition and preliminary evaluation of the telemedicine products and services. A classification form and an informative questionnaire were used to gather all the relevant information about the telemedicine application under test. Phase II was focused on evaluation and quality control of the telemedicine product. A Technical File and a Quality Assessment Checklist were used to assess the telemedicine product and service. The telemedicine quality control system was suitable for the efficient evaluation of telemedicine applications. A quality level was assigned to each product according to a threshold and an algorithm. All telemedicine products tested passed the test with a quality level higher than the threshold. The quality control system assured the definition of standardized quality levels for the telemedicine products and services. The study presented in this paper could be useful for promoting the use of standardized telemedicine applications, and therefore speeding up their integration process in the national health service.