Adoption of Telemedicine in Scottish Remote and Rural General Practices: A Qualitative Study

In the past decade there has been increasing use of information technology in Scottish primary care. The majority of general practitioners (GPs) now accept that computing is part of their everyday practice. Some GPs in Scotland have used telemedicine for the referral of patients for specialist opinion or for access to educational resources. However, although the potential benefits of telemedicine to primary care are arguably greatest in the remote and rural context, the few existing studies suggest that uptake is slow and piecemeal. There have been a number of studies of the knowledge, experience and attitudes of health-care professionals to telemedicine. These have indicated that although there is general satisfaction with the experience of using telemedicine, health professionals have concerns about the negative effect on the consultation, establishing the infrastructure and adopting telemedicine systems into existing organizational systems