Summary

The development of telemedicine and telecare has been changed all over the world the recent decades as practitioners and health care managers reached better understanding of the use of information and communication technologies to offer urgent and qualified medical services at a distance. Governments and health care providers have shown a large initial interest in the benefits of telemedicine services to reduce costs mostly for patient’s transfer to tertiary hospitals or for educational purposes but have been slow to provide strategic plans and procedures in order to proceed the projects into practice. The paper identifies the involvement of governments, healthcare management, healthcare professionals and IT suppliers in telemedicine policy development and reviews the experience of Greece in the specific field which seems that despite the enormous scientific interest for both medicine and health informatics, the practice until now has not gained the expected results. Furthermore, the analysis concerns the critical success factors that have to be revised simultaneously with the main managerial principles for the design and implementation of quality telemedicine and telecare services.