Telemedicine Implementation in Italy’s National Health Service: Current Status and Future Prospects.

The health system in Italy faces significant challenges due to factors such as the management of the national health service, the influx of foreign populations and the ageing of the population. These challenges are compounded by projections that point to a future shortage of health workers. The national health service is crucial to the country’s economy and needs continuous improvements and expansions. The COVID-19 pandemic has further highlighted the tension in the healthcare system, both in Italy and globally, with difficulties in managing the elderly patients most vulnerable to the virus. In such a complex and unprecedented situation, the use of technological resources, in particular telemedicine, has emerged as a vital tool to address the challenges faced by healthcare professionals. The analysis shows that there is not just one type of telemedicine, and each approach must be evaluated individually. Within Healthcare, the aforementioned difficulty has led to the implementation of the use of technological supports, such as telemedicine, in order to be able to deal with two fundamental problems: the first, the need to provide the necessary treatments to the greatest number of patients possible; the second, to do it in the safest way, avoiding unnecessary assembly and access to hospital facilities (of all types). The aim of this work in progress is a domain-oriented data collection (still in progress) to make estimates about the activation and implementation of specific telemedicine tools.