Telemedicine in Egypt: SWOT analysis and future trends

Today, many countries have succeeded in integrating telemedicine and advanced technologies into a broad-range of healthcare processes including diagnosis, treatment, disease prevention, and health education & research. Nevertheless, many developing countries are still unable to sustain meaningful telemedicine projects. Egypt has achieved significant progress in building the Information Society (IS), by providing an enabling legal and regulatory framework, and an adequate Information and Communications Technology (ICT) infrastructure. However, telemedicine projects in Egypt still face common problems and challenges that hinder the wide-scale adoption of eHealth systems. This study provides a comprehensive Strengths, Weaknesses, Opportunities, and Threats (SWOT) analysis of the current telemedicine applications in Egypt. Based on that, four future trends in Telemedicine in Egypt 2020 have been identified from governmental, financial, technological, and medical perspectives. Consequently, these future trends were aligned to the global trends in telemedicine. The main output of this study is that telemedicine should be part of a National eHealth Initiative. GMS Medizinische Informatik, Biometrie und Epidemiologie; 8(1):Doc01; ISSN 1860-9171