What constitutes success in telehealth?

Before telehealth applications can be judged, there must be some general un derstanding about what constitutes success. At first sight it seems that de fining success in a telehealth application should be relatively easy: a suc cessful application is one that produces high-quality care at low cost. How ever, the calculation of cost requires some care, since it depends on assum ing a particular financial perspective (the patient's, the health-care prov ider's, or society's) and is meaningless without a statement of the workloa d being handled. Other factors include the context in which the service is being delivered. Ultimately, the political imperative may override any rati onal judgement of success.