Regional Telemedicine Forum
The societal and economic benefits from wider use of telemedicine are potentially huge. The European Cohesion Policy is to deliver the renewed Lisbon Strategy for Growth and Jobs (2007 – 2013), which is promoting innovation as a possible way of finding appropriate solutions for many of the societal challenges. The RTF partners are proposing to establish a Regional Telemedicine Forum to deliver innovation at regional level. Despite the benefits and technical maturity of the applications, the use of telemedicine services is still limited in Europe. It has become evident that actions have to be taken at regional level, by 1) developing policy recommendations addressing the main barriers hindering the wider use of telemedicine, 2) exchange of good practises, and 3) providing evidence of successful telemedicine to build trust and acceptance. Such actions will contribute to ensuring that regional policies will respond better to today's economic and social challenges.
Until now the majority of the eHealth and telemedicine projects within the Structural Funding programmes have focused mainly on interoperability issues between few regions (standardisations and infrastructures for secure electronic communication) and the testing of few telemedicine pilots. 

A couple of new EU initiatives have a similar focus as RTF on the policy level and on the exchange of good practices in the domain of eHealth. As a contrast to previous experiences the RTF partnership wants to focus on the development of policy recommendations to European regions which can help them in their efforts to release the potential of wider implementation and deployment of telemedicine services at regional level - hereby improving patient care and healthcare system efficiency as well as market development for regional SMEs. The policy recommendations will be developed on the basis of identification and analysis of barriers at clinical, evaluation, strategy and market levels.
Another added value of the RTF is the combination of the development of policy recommendations for European regions in conjunction with good practice guidelines which intend to make it possible to duplicate and replicate successful status quo telemedicine services for chronic patients in other European regions.