Telemedicine Acceptance and Implementation in Developing Countries: Benefits, Categories, and Barriers

Distributing health care services in remote and rural areas have become a major health problem for many developing countries. Telemedicine presents solutions to developing countries for better disease prevention, disease management, emergency services and practicing medicine in areas with limited access to healthcare services and facilities. Although the willingness of developing countries to accept telemedicine and incorporate it into their health care systems is rising, due to multidisciplinary and complicated characteristics of telemedicine, they will face challenges and barriers which will slow down their progress. This literature review attempts to explain the benefits, categories and barriers for acceptance and implementation of telemedicine in developing countries. This study was conducted in 2016. The main question was how is the general attitude to the acceptance and use of telemedicine in developing countries and what problems they are facing for the use of telemedicine. To find the solutions, we searched articles in two main databases, PubMed and Scopus, with the keywords and expressions related to the subject of the study (developing countries, telemedicine, tele-health, barriers, challenges, adoption, and acceptance). Totally, 103 articles were extracted. Duplicate articles and articles published before 1998 were eliminated and the remaining ones were screened for eligibility in accordance with subject of the study. The result was 47 articles from PubMed and 5 articles from Scopus. This review is based mainly on preliminary results, opinions and predictions. As limitations of our study, we limited ourselves to PubMed and Scopus databases and also reviewed articles only in English language. The study did not find any article that totally disagrees with the implementation of telemedicine in developing countries. Most of the articles contain positive points associated with the use of telemedicine with respect to the barriers and challenges. Despite hopeful progresses in telemedicine, developing countries are facing many problems in their way toward successful application of telemedicine. High cost and cultural resistance are considered as the main barriers for developing countries in their approach to apply telemedicine. Developing countries must be fully aware that investment in telemedicine will not inevitably yield clinical or economic benefits in short time. They must consider barriers and various outcomes of telemedicine before accepting and applying it.