Situation, motivation, implementation and results of telehealth-enabled health care.

Well-implemented telehealth systems can reduce the total costs of care by reducing emergency hospital visits and unnecessary treatment. Telehealth is especially well-suited to supporting patients with chronic, complex or co-morbid conditions. A substantial body of research--much from the USA--documents the value of a commercially-available system which supplements remote monitoring with daily questions about the patient's health and behaviours. However, there are still very few large scale deployments of telehealth because the best practices needed to implement it are still being developed.