The Future of Telemedicine in Europe and Methods for the Evaluation of Health Services

Despite the accumulation of evidence for the effects of approaches to chronic illness, methodological and analytical work is still needed to develop widely accepted evaluation methods that are scientifically sound and also practicable in routine settings. Given all the diversity and variability of disease management, a key issue for this work concerns the difficulties in establishing a useful “comparator” in settings where it is not practical or possible to execute an evaluation as a randomized controlled trial (RCT). This is indeed an important task because evaluation methods are a precondition to select efficient and effective programs, or components within a program that can address the growing burden of chronic and more in general health conditions. This is evident, in particular, when it comes to new technologies in medicine and implementation and evaluation, in the healthcare sectors, distinguishing low-income countries, on the one-hand, and those in other middle income countries.