How to move telemedicine from pilot to scale

Brussels, 5 February 2015:  What is needed to deploy telemedicine?  The right context, involvement of the key people, good planning and sound “running” of the process.  The Momentum Blueprint, published today in its final version, offers critical success factors and performance indicators that help decision makers to scale up healthcare services from a distance through information technology.  And it delivers a self-assessment toolkit that helps an organisation determine whether it is “ready” for telemedicine deployment.  The Blueprint and supporting documents are available here:

Momentum Blueprint (validated, final version) (pdf, 0.9 MB)

Momentum test phase report (pdf, 1.4 MB)

The Blueprint comes from the Momentum project, a three-year initiative of European eHealth stakeholder associations and competence centres that was co-funded by the European Commission.  Although Momentum ended in January 2015, key experts and contributors to Momentum will remain available to provide support on how to use the Momentum toolkit, and can be contracted to help an organisation or region deploy telemedicine and share their experience.

“Telemedicine deployment is not rocket science:  it will work if the critical elements are in place” says Marc Lange, coordinator of the Momentum project and General Secretary of EHTEL. “The Blueprint distils the key learnings from the Momentum project:  it can be used as a kind of cookbook or set of guidelines for doing telemedicine scale-up.”

The final Momentum Blueprint builds on two earlier versions which were released in May 2014 and December 2014.  This final version was substantially edited and abridged; the explanations and the order of the critical success factors were improved; and the self-assessment toolkit was added.  The toolkit is a combination of the Telemedicine Readiness Self-Assessment Tool (TREAT) and Momentum’s critical success factors.  Used under the right circumstances, the toolkit helps to gauge the level of readiness of an organisation by way of a comprehensive questionnaire and a consultative workshop involving all stakeholders.  It can ensure that the people in the organisation share the vision of scaling-up and are committed to its success.

About the project:
The Momentum project convened telemedicine experts and stakeholders from more than 20 organisations in Europe. The project ended in January 2015.  The website and the Blueprint remain online.  Key contributors are also committed to preserving the project legacy and to help other organisations in their own journey to scale.  The project was funded as a thematic network under the ICT Policy Support Programme (ICT PSP) as part of the Competitiveness and Innovation Programme of the European Commission.  More information is at www.telemedicine-momentum.eu.