The 18 critical success factors cover overall context (ie, cultural readiness, financing), management aspects (the need for leadership, for a business plan, for change management), legal and security issues (including liability or the regulatory environment for data management), and technology considerations (including interoperability). They are collected in a short document with annotations available at http://telemedicine-momentum.eu/18-factors.
These factors require more validation, and the publication of this list begins a public consultation phase. Momentum invites interested parties to comment via Momentum's social networks (LinkedIn, Twitter or Facebook), by email to the consortium, or face-to-face in dissemination events like today's session at eHealth Forum 2014 in Athens entitled "The Secrets of Telehealth: how to deploy services in routine care".
"Telemedicine in Europe suffers from 'pilotitis', a glut of technology experiments that have received start-up subsidies from public or commercial sources to get them off the ground, but which cease to exist once the subsidy is withdrawn," says Marc Lange, Secretary General of EHTEL and coordinator of the Momentum project. "Our success factors will help the 'doers' move their projects into routine care and scale them up to provide real benefits to patients in Europe."
The Momentum project convenes telemedicine experts and stakeholder organisations from more than 20 organisations in Europe. The final outcome of the project will be a blueprint for telemedicine deployment which will be published in December 2014. The project invites all interested parties to comment on the critical success factors, to submit successful practices, and to join the Momentum network. More dissemination events will be held between May and September 2014. For an ongoing list and more information, please visit www.telemedicine-momentum.eu.
About the Momentum project
Momentum is a thematic network designed to share knowledge and experience in deploying telemedicine services into routine care. Working together, Momentum's members who come from all corners of Europe will develop, test and finalise a blueprint for telemedicine deployment that offers guidance for anybody who seeks to move telemedicine from an idea or a pilot to daily practice. The project is funded under the ICT Policy Support Programme (ICT PSP) as part of the Competitiveness and Innovation Framework Programme of the European Commission, and runs from 2012 to 2014.