Teleradiology in the Middle East is still a new-emerging field that has not been yet fully explored. Many people in the field of radiology practice know about teleradiology and are aware of the possibility of transmitting the radiological images over distance to be read and interpreted but only few have been really involved in teleradiology work as the whole teleradiology market in the Middle East is still newly budding, especially on the commercial level. Over the past few years, multiple healthcare facilities throughout the region of the Middle East have been moving towards the implementation of EMR and PACS systems turning their workflow environment to be paperless and depending more and more on the technology to achieve better healthcare service to their patients. Along with that change, many hospitals and healthcare providers have been exploring the other possibilities these systems can provide them to help in solving many problems they used to have including the increased demands for imaging procedures with shortage of radiologists and also the need of many medically underserved areas to get radiology service along with other medical services.

Multiple countries in the Middle East can find the ultimate solution for these problems in implementing and encouraging teleradiology. There are many countries within the region implementing healthcare plans with the aim of improving the quality of services provided to citizens and making the diagnostic imaging studies more available but such plans were always faced with the difficulty of providing enough radiologists to read these images. To solve that problem, the healthcare facilities used to bring and hire radiologists from other countries which costs them a lot in the form of salaries, benefits, traveling tickets and annual leaves while the total workload volume may not be that much. In such situation, these facilities may find that hiring a teleradiology service and only pay-per-study would reduce its expenses considerably while having the same quality of service.

Other Middle East countries have multiple medically underserved areas which lack enough healthcare providers and radiologists, may be because of the maldistribution or shortage of qualified radiologists. To obtain a radiological study, the patient has to travel to another city and pay for expenses of the trip and for his stay, and he may need to travel again to get the results. In this situation, the problem is not only in providing the machines, because even if there are CT and MRI machines in these areas, many radiologists would not like to move to another city to read images and here comes the role of teleradiology which would save both patient and radiologist's time.

The great developments in PACS systems and EMRs have made Teleradiology affordable and easily applicable in the Middle East.

Editorial Team