Essential telemedicine elements (tele-ments) for connecting the academic health center and remote community providers to enhance patient care.

The authors draw on their experience with the University of California, San Diego Medical Center's successful enterprise-level clinical telemedicine program to present a paradigm for other academic health centers (AHCs) that wish to develop such a program. They detail key telemedicine program elements, or "tele-ments," that they consider essential to the development of a centralized, structured telemedicine program and relevant to the development of smaller programs. These tele-ments include an overall organizational vision, a centralized telemedicine infrastructure, telemedicine-specific policies and procedures, medical record documentation, relationships between the AHC clinical hub and its remote (spoke) partners, identification of and training for specialty providers, a business plan based on service agreements and/or insurance billing, and licensure/privileging. They discuss the importance of delaying equipment purchases until a plan is in place for sustaining the telemedicine enterprise and of establishing measures to define success at the outset of program development. In addition, they detail the benefits and concerns associated with telemedicine, provide a comprehensive listing of the roles and responsibilities of providers and staff involved in all aspects of telemedicine, and share samples of their program's informed consent forms and workflow checklists. Their goal is to offer support and guidance to other AHCs entering the telemedicine arena, enabling them to replicate key elements of a successful, enterprise-wide telemedicine infrastructure.