The European Regional Telemedicine Forum (RTF) project springs from the cooperation among 9 European partners who created a group aimed at defining guidelines for best practice and spreading of telemedicine services at European level. Particular attention was focussed on the use of telemonitoring services for patients suffering from chronic diseases. In the project, developed in the framework of the INTERREG IVC Programme, Arsenàl.ITprovides technical support to the Veneto REGION (in particular LHA n. 9) to define the contents, the organization of workshops and coordination for drafting telemedicine guidelines.

The partners established a Regional Telemedicine Forum (RTF), which has the aim of spreading innovation in each region involved in the project. Beyond the benefits and the technical ripeness of the applications, the supply of telemedicine services is quite limited at European level. For this reason the project started from the definition of guidelines that have to be applied at regional level to overcome obstacles to the application of telemedicine services on a large scale. All this with the view of improving the quality of healthcare services by reducing costs.

The large partnership, composed by 9 partners coordinated by the Region of Southern Denmark and represented by the LHA n.9 Treviso for the Veneto Region, aims at assessing the potential of setting up telemedicine services inside each Region. In 3 years partners are involved in workshops, study visits and teleconference meetings to develop and deeply study the theme of telemedicine services linked to 3 pathologies: diabetes, chronic obstructive pulmonary disease (COPD) and cardiovascular diseases.