Table 2.

Opportunities and challenges in the introduction of telemedicine services in the management of patients with chronic respiratory failure

Opportunities	Challenges
Reduce travel time and frequency of attendance at outpatient clinics [44, 82]	Patient and healthcare professional acceptance of telemedicine [74, 122]
More frequent monitoring and contact with patients [48, 49]	Familiarity with technology [69, 114]
Reduce caregiver burden [101]	Infrastructure costs [123]
Improve QoL [40, 47, 92]	Data security and reliability [119, 121, 122]
Reduce attendance at primary care and emergency department [37, 38, 63, 94]	High-quality evidence to justify use [4, 5, 118]
Reduce hospitalisations [36, 38, 63, 64, 79, 94]	An increase in workload to monitor large amounts of data [123]
Increase patient empowerment with immediate feedback [69]
Potential for long-term cost savings [46, 87]
Opportunity for big data analysis to answer outstanding questions in rare conditions [107]