**2.3 Factors for readiness and adoption**

In addition to consideration of the acceptance by the patient and the clinician, there is also a need to understand the readiness of an organisation to host telehealth. This can include understanding the readiness of the technology and the key stakeholders.

Readiness of technology will include understanding the availability and capability of the communication technology (networks) that will span between the parties involved in the telehealth activity, and the availability of suitable end equipment. Understanding the availability and capability of the technology can be complex, as this must be assessed for its ability to support specific applications; the bandwidth and delay required for video and store-and-forward are quite different and will be affected in different ways. Likewise the bandwidth required to transfer images and a vital sign will be quite different. Network capability can easily be assessed by consideration of the technology being used, undertaking performance measurements on the network using one of the many tools such as iPerf [17], and assessing the performance of typical applications. For example, in the implementation of the AFHCAN network, the large delays experienced using a satellite based network caused problems in many applications that were based on the TCP protocol (such as web), and had to be modified to use the UDP protocol.

Assessing readiness of the key stakeholders takes the form administering questionnaires (quantitative research) and conducting interviews through focus groups

**Figure 7.** *Smartphone Usage [14].*

### *Results from Telehealth DOI: http://dx.doi.org/10.5772/intechopen.101183*

and with individuals to gain deeper understanding (qualitative research) (see [18] for details on design of research studies).

Issues that are raised can be complex depending on the country, politics and situation, and may not relate only to professional issues. For example [19] considers the effects of culture on the acceptance of telehealth in Middle Eastern countries. Standardized methodology has been developed in order to undertake assessment of readiness in studies such [20].
