A lot is being said about telemedicine, ehealth, electronic medical records, health informatics, healthcare technology advacements and its use in medicine.  Telemedicine as a profession and as technology is increasing in the Middle East.  You will see many emerging companies who are offering telemedicine services, teleradiology services and other teleconsultation options in the Middle East.  While thinking of all this, I really sometimes ponder on whether we are running after the technology and leaving the "medicine" behind? Whether the distribution of efforts in e-health/technology and the actual patient care and medical service availability is balanced?

A few years back while i was part of the team who were collecting information on equipment present inside the local hospitals in one of the developing countries in the Middle East as a part of RFI for the national E-health strategy, we visited one of the famous and highly crowded hospital and to my surprise, it had only two very old computers in the WHOLE hospital.  The hospital building walls were representing ancient construction technology with stuffed concrete where were unable to establish a wireless connection between two rooms even for RF monitoring devices.  The hospital itself did not have the basic infrastructure to receive patients in a more professional way.  This is when we were talking of a national strategy of building a national PACS in the country.

Those days, when I spoke to one of senior PACS consultants in US, and inquired him about the current RFI status and future expectations, he was surprised and his comments were that when we go paperless/filmless in a hospital, there MUST be a paper system, some SOPs, some routine workflow cycle, whatsoever and basic infrastructure so that we can talk about going "filmless" or "paperless".   I have witnessed since then many similar examples of hospitals in developing countries in the Middle East during consultation or providing our telemedicine services and every time I have this big question hanging in front of my eyes, "Telemedicine or just Medicine"?

Editorial Team