Future of Telemedicine in Heart Disease

Telemedicine is facing multiple challenges to be established on a broad basis. To overcome these barriers strategies have to be developed with respect to current and future market drivers and restraints. Against the background of the promising revenue forecast for the European market of €900 million by 2011, telemedicine is a very promising field for all health care providers. In cardiology, solutions for ‘pHealth’ and ‘eHealth’ are already very sophisticated using the outcome of the ‘MyHeart’ project. As an enabler for ‘eHealth’ an advanced IT infrastructure such as the German electronic health card is essential. To fulfill the growth promises telemedicine has to pay attention to the auxiliary areas of telemetric, medical information, health research service, content and IT telematic infrastructure. The development of telemedicine will remain a highly interesting and a challenging field.