Practical Methods of Color Quality Assurance for Telemedicine Systems

___________________________ __________________________________ Telemedicine is experiencing significant growth in the U.S. and around the world, with a strong focus on improving the delivery of healthcare to remote rural areas. The Arizona Telemedicine Program has operated a statewide program since 1996, which provides multi-specialty care and educational content. Three of the most active specialties are image based: radiology, dermatology and pathology. Teleradiology is well established in the U.S. and well integrated into standard department practice, Teledermatology offers similar characteristics and fits well into the paradigm of remote practice, but introduces the additional factor of color fidelity. Color provides significant information for the dermatologist. It is critical that the color in a dermatology image captured at a remote site is reproduced faithfully at the consulting site. However, in many telemedicine applica­ tions the remote rural sites present significant challenges of lack of high-speed communications infrastructure, reliability of power and availability of skilled teclmical personnel. In this type of setting it is useful to establish practical methods for quality assurance that are inexpensive and do not rely on complex teclmology. The Arizona Telemedicine Program employs these practical methods in two programs involving very rural sites and has found them to be effective and appro­ priate for remote sites with limited resources.